After several years of successful physical events in different countries, Nordea Startup & Growth started organising online Nordic investor speed dating events in the autumn of 2020. The pandemic had restricted the possibility of meeting in person, and Nordea saw a growing appetite among global investors for the creativity and strong business ideas coming from the Nordic startup scene.
“We thought: we have 4,500 startups and growth companies as customers in the Nordics and we also know hundreds of investors (venture capital funds, corporate venture capital companies, angel investors), so why not arrange for them to meet?,” explains Teija Nousiainen, Deal Flow Manager at Nordea Startup & Growth.
Investors come well prepared
Since the autumn of 2020, 12 Nordea Investor Speed Dating events have been held, and 400 Nordic startup/growth companies and 470 investors have been matched at 1,300 one-to-one meetings.
One of the participating companies in the event in November 2021 was ONEiO from Finland, which afterwards landed seed-round capital of EUR 7,2m and found its lead investor Fairpoint Capital at a Nordea speed date.
“The format is really time-efficient as it is a closed event and the participating startups/scaleups and investors have mutual interests,” says Juha Berghäll, CEO of ONEiO Cloud.
“The participating venture capital funds are looking for Nordic companies from the specific area that they represent. Then when the brief one-to-one meeting takes place, it’s easy to decide whether a follow-up meeting is needed. We also liked the fact that venture capital funds choose who they want to meet – this way we don’t need to do the analysis and they come well prepared for the meeting,” Juha Berghäll explains.