The Inner Foundation<\/a>, founded by Northzone Founder PJ P\u00e4rsson and his wife Annika Sten P\u00e4rsson.<\/p>\nUV\u2019s\u00a0portfolio companies so far include four main standout companies.<\/p>\n
Out of its investments from this fund so far, Climate X (UK), has raised the most at \u20ac10.65M. This climate analytics startup is closer to the FinTech space, as it assesses the climate risk in to for asset holders. <\/p>\n
Ocean Oasis\u00a0(Norway) is in sustainable desalination using wave energy. Messel said: \u201cDesalination is quite a co2 intense process, but they\u2019ve come up with a solution of using wave technology, enabling not only more freshwater to be accessible, but also creating and producing it in a sustainable way.\u201d<\/p>\n
SciFree (Sweden) offers open access to research for universities. Bavey said: \u201cIn a world where we have fake news and research being attacked imagine what that will mean for entrepreneurship and innovation, having access to an open source database of research? It\u2019s just incredible. This startup creates transparency over who is getting funded at the end of the day because there\u2019s also a lot of issues behind the research.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Meela Health (SWE) is a matchmaking tool for therapists and clients targeting women first. Bavey commented: \u201cMeela is matchmaking tool for therapists and clients targeting women first, but also now extending to men. Over 60% of people go into therapy drops off before the third session, but Meela drop off rate is to less than 2%. So it really speaks volumes about them enabling AI for the matchmaking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other companies in the new fund include: <\/p>\n
\u2013 FJONG (NO) \u2013 circular fashion
\u2013 Leia Health (SWE) \u2013 personalized parental health
\u2013 Equality Check (NO) \u2013 diversity and inclusion analytics
\u2013 DORA (DEN) -digitizing towards greener freight transport<\/p>\n
The next target for the fund will aim at synthetic biology startups.<\/p>\n
Among these investments, UV claims 75% are founded by all-female teams, and over 25% have a founder or co-founder from an ethnic minority. Moreover, 67% of the portfolio focuses on combating climate change, while 20% addresses female health-related challenges.<\/p>\n
Prior to founding UV, Copenhagen-based Messel was a banker who went on to co-found and develop platforms supporting tech and impact startups. She\u2019s also former member of UNEP-FI working group for Sustainable Banking.<\/p>\n
Bavey is a former EdTech founder who built and launched concepts for supporting underrepresented founders in the Nordics.<\/p>\n
Over an interview, Bavey told me that although the new fund is a full- blown VC stucture, \u201cit\u2019s easier to decide on diverse investments because we\u2019ve been following them for so long.\u201d <\/p>\n
While she admits \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of impact funds popping up\u201d in theNordics, she says the uniqueness of UV is \u201cnot only do we only invest in those type of diverse founders, but we we are also the the only fund that also invest only with impact at the core.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pair also think Femtech remains a space waiting to be unpacked further by Impact Funds: \u201cIf we look at female health, we\u2019re seeing some really interesting deals there. Startups in that space are targeting problems that none has really thought about. It\u2019s not just about fertility or menstruation, there are a lot of other layers in between and that\u2019s what we\u2019re also excited about to explore more,\u201d added Bavey. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As has been pointed out many, many times, lack of diversity is an ongoing problem in the tech startup and VC landscape. It\u2019s a fact that\u2019s long been recognised in the US, and it\u2019s of equal concern in Europe. Zoom in on the Nordics region, and the lack of diversity sadly becomes even more acute. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}