Estonian Karma Ventures has announced the closing of its second fund at €100 million. The capital will be used towards the firm’s efforts in backing early-stage European deeptech startups in their Seed and Series A rounds, with a ticket size going up to €5 million.
Experienced DeepTech trio Tommi Uhari, Margus Uudam, and Kristjan Laanemaa are leading the fund with have invested in a number of deeptech startups including successful exits to SAP, Dynatrace, and Splunk.
Karma Ventures’ latest fund is is backed by Baltic Innovation Fund 2 (BIF 2), an cooperative initiative between the Republic of Estonia, the Republic of Latvia, the Republic of Lithuania and European Investment Fund, the founding engineers of Skype, Jaan Tallinn and Ahti Heinla , Till Quack (Qualcomm, Apple, Mapillary), Jani Huoponen (Google) and Sergei Anikin (Pipedrive). Existing investors include Isomer, Skype founder’s investment company ASI and Swedbank and LHV’s pension funds.
“We are very grateful for the extremely strong vote of confidence from our existing and new investors,” commented Uudam. “Closing Karma II marks another significant milestone in our mission to partner with deep-tech start-ups in Europe solving significant global challenges. Having a strong background in deep-tech and being confident with the technological risks involved, we aim to help founders build companies with positive global impact.”
Founding partner Kristjan Laanemaa added, “The Nordic-Baltic region has the highest density of unicorns per capita in Europe. This is creating an inspiring environment for strong deep tech startups. We are excited to leverage our deep tech startup expertise in all of Europe.”