Tallinn-based seed-stage venture fund Trind VC has announced the closing of its €55 million second fund to back startups that have a positive impact on the environment.
The new fund will support 30-40 startups and make initial investments of up to €1 million, with a minimum ticket size of €100,000. Follow-up rounds will be joined with a ticket size of up to €5 million. For the potential portfolio companies, Trind VC will conduct ESG due diligence before investing and will continue to monitor to make sure that they are ESG compliant.
The fund is backed by institutional investors such as European Investment Fund, Finnish Industry Investment (Suomen Teollisuussijoitus), LHV Pension Funds, and Swedbank Investment Funds.
Trind VC primarily invests in companies with B2C and C2C business models, alongside consumerised B2B software. The company also uses its experience with other startups on how to utilise this data to develop products, build go-to-market strategy, marketing, and monetisation models to achieve high scalability, and be ready for an A-round.
Joel Aasmäe, managing partner at Trind VC said: “Our investment thesis is quite simple. We are looking for startups with clear traction from a big enough market – general hype or buzzwords won’t get us excited. We are using the data for both when making our investment decisions, more importantly in developing the companies. There’s a clear bottleneck for funding for consumer startups in the area compared to B2B equivalents.”
Trind VC can act as a lead investor. However, it can also co-invest, with a local VC leading the round in case of European cross-border investments. It will also continue to co-invest with prominent angel syndicates in order to bring more expertise to the startup via board positions and advisory work, compared to just its own resources. The company’s earlier fund has invested in the likes of Estonian Fractory, Ready Player Me and Finnish Neural DSP and Jobilla.
According to Reima Linnanvirta, partner at Trind VC, Estonia and Finland form one of the strongest startup ecosystems in Europe, and the region has been producing excellent startups. While the funding environment has been getting tougher, the VC aims to offer continuity in the availability of funding by investing through the cycle as it believes that great founders should get funded in all market conditions.
Linnanvirta said: “We were targeting to raise €50 million, but as we already have more commitments, we will go slightly above that in the second closing. Most of our LPs from Fund I joined Fund II, a sign of trust we truly appreciate. We have top tier institutions from the region investing in the fund, alongside our expanding angel investor community.”
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