Helsinki-based venture capital firm Wave Ventures has announced its second fund at €2 million. Thanks to this fund’s backers a.k.a unicorn founders including Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Kristo Ovaska (Smartly) and Miki Kuusi (Wolt) with many others, Wave Ventures is targeting 25 to 30 promising GenZ teams at the early stage emerging from Nordic startup ecosystem to help them change the world.
Wave Ventures was founded in 2017 with the mission of boosting the quantity and quality of startups and founders emerging from the startup ecosystem by offering valuable, low-threshold support both in terms of money and other guidance.
As a student-run company, Wave Ventures set out to provide an opportunity for the ideas that will change the world to flourish, pointing to the successes of young founders. With this second fund, they plan to support millennial ventures, university research and/or young/first time founders who have not yet encouraged enough to trigger them for their first steps into entrepreneurship, of course with the support of many successful unicorn-builders.
“We want to make the leap easier for promising aspiring founders by investing in them earlier than any European VC has done before,” says Erik Kymäläinen, the newly appointed CEO of Wave Ventures. “Currently, there are some so-called “super founders” who have proved themselves and can attract the attention of VCs and angel investors very early. The challenge is that there is no systematic approach to how to help, validate – and invest in people at the earliest stage.”
“Pre-seed investors often want to see validated ideas, but we believe that the most promising young founders should receive support much earlier – and this is where we step in as a VC – we offer encouragement and resources to build something big enough to have an impact”, says Kymäläinen.
