Oslo-based SNÖ Ventures is winding down, and its three partners will continue investing as solo GPs. The firm, which is backed by German-American billionaire Peter Thiel, most recently launched a target $100m fund in 2021 to back Nordic tech companies.
On Monday the firm announced that its partners — including founding partners Magne Uppman and Teodor Bjerrang — have decided to launch their own new funds instead of raising more funds with SNÖ. The firm said that its first fund, of $12m (100m NOK), delivered “top-percentile returns” and that its second fund, which closed far below its target at around $54m (550m NOK), according to the firm, is “showing strong early momentum”. The second fund still has capital left to allocate and the partners remain “fully committed to supporting the SNÖ portfolio,” they said.
According to Uppman, the firm was in a good position to raise its third fund but during the summer the partners sat down to figure out the future of SNÖ.
“We opened the door to discuss whether a third fund was the only option for us,” he tells Sifted. “Pretty fast we entertained the idea of pursuing our own strategies going forward and found that more motivating.”
SNÖ’s third partner, Max Samuel, joined after working for Thiel Capital.
Small is beautiful
The firm’s most recent $54m fund aimed to back early-stage, high-growth companies from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark. SNÖ’s bets include defence drones startup Nordic Air Defence, blockchain games maker Sky Mavis/Axie Infinity and AI manufacturing startup Aris Machina.
Uppman says that he sees two separate venture strategies winning going forward: either being a very big firm or having a small fund that can be flexible and fast-moving.
“We’ve had very good performance at SNÖ but going forward, we could see a risk that SNÖ would quickly be caught in the middle — too small to compete with the large firms and too large to be flexible and fast-moving,” Uppman says.
Bjerrang and Uppman founded the firm nearly 10 years ago. In a LinkedIn post, Bjerrang said that his next chapter “will involve plenty of games, music and entertainment.”
