Has it been a good year?
Since we are no politicians the answer from our perspective will be short and sweet: Yes.
Spring was for us a hectic period, we hosted events in Trolleholm Castle, Copenhagen and London (where our Nordic Cleantech Showcase sold out the biggest conference facility of the London Stock Exchange!).
Autumn saw the birth of a new type of events, where members meet exclusively to share investment opportunities, trends and market insights. First one in Stockholm was also the first Industry Group Meeting. It was greatly appreciated and something we will surely replicate across the Nordics. Report on Cleantech Strategies in Industry and Half-year Dealflow Report were handed out.
Autumn also meant a new way to share investment opportunities, where we work more and more with individual targeted referrals of companies. We still host a database of investment opportunities accessible for you as members, but we increasingly try to send cases to you directly. We will continue this way of working, and are for this purpose in regular contact with a larger and larger group of growth cases.
We kept momentum going after Stockholm and went to the sunny side of the USA, with a group of companies, partly from your portfolios and partly from the Nordic Cleantech Open competition. All in all 11 start-ups and a few of you came along for a very intense week in California culminating in our own Nordic Cleantech Showcase in Palo Alto. An event that filled American law firm Cooley’s to the brim with 120 participants, among them close to all of the leading Cleantech VCs present in Silicon Valley. Interest was high once we got a hold of US investors. It remains to be seen how fruitful this exchange was, but we believe that the Nordics is now in a stage, both in terms of dealflow and co-investors, where a portion of the US venture market will see it appetizing to start investing.
A key to keep adding value to our members is to have the best pipeline of Nordic Cleantech deals. One way for us to secure this is trough the work we do at Nordic Cleantech Open and we want to say a few things about it. This year we have chased entrepreneurs down! We had 97 applicants in, a few of them have been in stealth mode up until their application. We are so impressed by the quality of some of these we dare stick our chin out and predict that we will actually see an increasing number of Cleantech fast-growers in the Nordics over the next few years!
Alexander Lidgren,
Cleantech Scandinavia