Startuplab, a leading startup incubator and accelerator in Norway, has closed its fifth fund of €32m.
Investors include pension company KLP, investment company Investinor, Norway’s state-owned climate investment company Nysnø, PE firm Ferd, telecom company Telenor and housing developer OBOS, as well as around 70 operators and founders with backgrounds from Northzone, Kahoot, Opera Software, Visma, Meltwater and others.
The fund aims to back between 20–25 pre‑seed Norwegian tech startups annually, writing cheques of $250k–500k for 8–10% ownership, with the option for one follow-on investment to maintain its stake.
“That gives us the opportunity to back companies where, even with just a ‘mediocre‑plus’ outcome, the valuation can end up around $2m — which is actually a pretty good result for a pre‑seed fund,” says partner Gisle Østereng.
With a founder‑first, high‑volume model, Startuplab Ventures has backed 200 Norwegian startups, including edtech company Kahoot, smart tablet maker reMarkable, energy startup Photoncycle and bird‑monitoring AI startup Spoor, which raised an $8m Series A last week.
Although a relatively small tech hub, Norway has shown its strengths in climate tech, with €220m invested in the sector in the last year. The most popular sectors have been agritech and water and maritime tech, with 11 deals each in the past year, according to Sifted data.
While Startuplab is sector‑agnostic, the company says it is seeing more AI than climate tech deals coming through.
“We still do climate, but we’re agnostic. It’s more about backing exceptional founders,” he says, mentioning Kahoot’s quiz and reMarkable’s smart tablet as examples. “It was all about the founder and those two are our biggest successes.”
The fund will also invest in life science, an area where Norway is strong, says Østereng.
“Norway has created a lot of great cases in life science. Now we’re investing in heart health, cancer health, also in all sorts of technology for detecting diseases. It seems like life science in Norway hasn’t yet been discovered by investors.”
Startuplab raised its first fund in 2013, at €2–3m, and has raised a new fund roughly every three years since then. Its fifth fund is twice the size of its previous vehicle and has the flexibility to invest in both first‑time founders and serial entrepreneurs.
The political playing field
But Norway has had a difficult time politically, with changes to the exit tax splitting the tech ecosystem and leading to an exodus of well‑known companies.
One of the country’s most well‑known startups is robotics company 1X, which moved its headquarters to the US earlier this year. The CEO, Bernt Øyvind Børnich, told local media at the time that they “had to move to survive”, citing Norway’s divisive exit tax as one of the reasons.
Earlier this year, Norwegian‑founded industrial AI and data software company Cognite made a similar decision to move its headquarters to the US. That the political decisions made in Norway have an impact on the tech ecosystem is clear.
Partner Jørgen Veiby says: “The other Nordic countries are looking at the tax policies in Norway and thinking ‘what are you doing?’”
He adds: “What everyone is hoping for now is that we can get some kind of tax conciliation.
“What they’re working on now is to get the two sides closer to each other and make some kind of firm lines in terms of structure so that both founders and investors can trust that these things will not change in the years to come.”
