Helsinki-based venture capital firm NordicNinja has announced its Fund II, with €200 million dedicated to investing in climate and deep technologies aimed at fostering a more equitable and sustainable future. NordicNinja focuses on startups operating at the intersection of climate tech, deep tech, and digital society, leveraging the expertise of its team with engineering backgrounds and a history of co-founding climate tech startups. The firm believes that Northern Europe holds the potential to produce global leaders in sustainable innovation and aims to facilitate connections between these innovators and Japan’s global networks. Fund II has secured investments from various European and Japanese investors, emphasizing sustainability and ESG considerations while addressing pressing global challenges. NordicNinja sees itself as a bridge between Japanese and European ecosystems, working collaboratively to drive positive change and innovation.
Founded in 2019, NordicNinja is a team with a global mindset that unites world-class former founders, operators, and engineers turned investors from Northern Europe and Japan. With engineering backgrounds and long-standing experience in green energy, the partners have a wealth of experience that is rare amongst Series A investors in Europe. They have co-founded climate tech startups such as Planet OS and H2GO Power and have leading tech executive experience through building new businesses within leading firms such as ABB and McKinsey.
The partners have also been significant angel investors, co-founding the Superangel fund, and managing a Japanese clean energy investment fund. Between them, they have made more than 80 partner-level investments and over 20 angel investments globally.
NordicNinja believes that the global leaders needed to drive the transition to a more sustainable world are to be found in Northern Europe – thanks to the region’s legacy in digital innovation and billion-dollar company building. The team believes that giving these leaders access to Japan’s global networks of investors and companies, coupled with VC partners with a successful track record of building tech companies, will help catapult them to unlock their technology’s potential. The fund is the bridge that links these two regions at the crucial Series A stage: linking East and West to create responsible innovation and impact. In this way, NordicNinja is creating a new style of global-minded, responsible VC fund for Europe.
From its €101 million Fund I, NordicNinja invested in companies that transformed industries including Bolt, Einride, Veriff, Voi, Starship, ClimateView, Kognic, Mavenoid, Pactum, Varjo, DappRadar and Ready Player Me. To date, NordicNinja has made 20 investments, three of which have achieved unicorn status, with a handful showing similar potential. Half of the first fund’s investments are in mobility and transportation – an area with a massive carbon footprint, as well as inefficiency and poor user experience.
With Fund II, NordicNinja will continue to invest in early-stage founders driving impactful change in sustainability and the digital society. In Fund I, it invested in technologies from self-driving electric trucks to climate action toolkits for cities, from AI-driven identity verification to AI alignment platforms, from mixed reality headsets training astronauts for their Mars mission to end-to-end transparency of sensitive supply chains.
The cornerstone investor in this fund is Japan Bank of International Cooperation (JBIC), a Japanese public financial institution represented in 18 countries around the world, which works to promote greater economic cooperation between Japan and overseas countries. European investors include BaltCap and Swedbank pension funds. Japanese investors include Honda and Omron, who also invested in Fund I.
Marek Kiisa, Managing Partner at NordicNinja, said: “We need to start solving the hard problems, and start solving them today if we’re to shift the dial in our fight against climate change. This is why sustainability and ESG underpin every deal, decision, and discussion to ensure we’re focused on taking action. Companies which we invested in are taking action today to deploy new solutions to reverse this trend – such as Einride, which enables a new freight system that is fully electric, autonomous, and able to decrease their clients emissions by up to 95%.”
Shinichi Nikkuni, Managing Partner at NordicNinja, said: “At NordicNinja, we’re looking for founding teams creating companies that have the potential to become leaders in their fields, solving the most pressing global challenges such as climate change and healthcare crisis. This takes more than just capital. Collaboration on a global scale is at the heart of this fund, building bridges of knowledge, experience and ambition so that we can become greater than the sum of our parts and create a better world to live in for all.
Tomosaku Sohara, Managing Partner at NordicNinja, said: “Thousands of kilometres apart, Japan and Europe have much in common. Both have company-building legacies, an appetite for innovation and understanding of the need to take care of the planet. NordicNinja is a bridge that turns these shared interests into common goals, bringing two of the world’s biggest ecosystems together for the benefit of us all.”
Rainer Sternfeld, Managing Partner at NordicNinja, said: “As former founders and operators, we know first-hand the difficulties in building and scaling technology businesses – particularly those in the difficult areas of digitalisation of established industries, digital society, and climate tech. Additionally, building a bridge between Japan and Europe serves our long-term mission of investing in the future we want to live in.”
