Our Investments in 2019
TLDR
- byFounders made 14 investments in 2019, including 11 new portfolio entries across Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the US.
Key Takeaways
- New investments include Contractbook (contract management, DK), Greenely (residential energy management, SE), Normative (ESG/carbon reporting SaaS, SE), Rune (AI-powered gaming social, DK/US), and Utopos (AI robot battle game, FI/US).
- Contractbook’s round included Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) making its first Danish investment; Sitecore founder Lars Fløe joined the board via byFounders Collective.
- Normative serves Summa Equity, Bonava, and Ikano; it pulls from internal systems and external environmental databases to auto-calculate carbon emissions.
- Follow-on investments went to SafetyWing (global insurance for remote workers, seed round), Uizard (sketch-to-wireframe ML tool, seed round), and Simple Feast (plant-based meal delivery, Series B led by 14W with Balderton).
- Six additional investments from 2019 were not yet disclosed at time of publication.
Why It Matters
- The portfolio spans contract infrastructure, energy transparency, ESG compliance, and gaming social – distinct verticals connected by Nordic founding teams with US expansion ambitions.
- byFounders Collective (a network of Nordic tech founders including David Helgason of Unity and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit) serves as a co-investor and board-seat source across deals.
- SafetyWing, previously backed by Y Combinator, framed its product as a “welfare state on the internet” targeting the growing population of geographically independent workers.
byFounders · 2025-06-10 · Read the original
