The Rising North Fund Invests in New Startup Initiatives

Founded last year in Finland, Rising North fund aims to help Nordic startups become global leaders. It finances projects and initiatives that tackle the challenges limiting the growth of Nordic companies with up to 50 000€. The fund that totals 1,5M€ has the goal to support at least 30 projects during the years 2016-18.

We are like a micro VC fund for the startup ecosystem organisations and very unique in the sense that we only fund projects that are created jointly by at least three Nordic organisations. This forces people to work together over borders which isn’t always easy but almost certainly beneficial in the long run.” comments Peik Hämekoski, the Operations Manager for the fund.

Rising North announced 5 new exciting projects organised jointly by Nordic organisations. The projects demonstrate strengths and knowledge of the region in deep technologies such as AI and MusicTech, and help startups to improve their skills, such as networking and public speaking. Applications sent to the fund are evaluated once a quarter with the next deadline being on September 15th. Find the projects below:

Nordic.AI Roundtables is a targeted series of roundtables to further the community building, coordinated marketing, PR, and internationalisation activities of the local AI ecosystem. The project is organized by the Nordic.AI (Denmark), Bakken & Bæck (Norway), and the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines (Iceland).

Nordic MusicTech Nexus is working on realising the global potential in Nordic music technology startups through a series of capacity building events and support schemes as well as by establishing a dedicated Nordic and pan-European investor network. The organizers include STHLM Music City (Sweden), Music Norway (Norway) and Slush Music (Finland).

Sino Track is a startup induction program designed for Nordic companies that are interested in entering the Chinese market. The project is lead by Pivot5 (Finland) and the co-organizers include Result (Sweden) and the TechBBQ (Denmark).

Student Talks x FallUp is an open mic speaking competition for 300 Nordic university students and entrepreneurs to emphasise the importance of speaking. This project is organized together by Aalto Entrepreneurship Society (Finland), Student Talks (Denmark) and Excitera (Sweden).

Techbikers Nordic will bring 60+ investors, technologists and founders together to cycle 420 km from Copenhagen to Berlin for a one-of-a-kind event. The event is organized by Nordic Makers (Denmark), Inventure (Finland) and Mapillary (Sweden).

Learn how to get involved and apply on Rising North website.