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Norrsken VC - Impact investing in a market downturn with Agate Freimane
Manage episode 329478636 series 3343567
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Agate Freimane is a General Partner at Norrsken VC, a €125m Swedish early stage impact VC investing in technology that solves some of the world’s greatest challenges.
She comes from investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then worked at a PropTech/Fintech startup: Brickvest.
In today's show, we will discuss with Agate:
- the state of Climate Tech in the Nordics
- the correlation between impact and financial returns
- What the current economic slowdown means for Climate Tech VC
- the biggest learnings from raising Norrsken VC and investing in 41 companies
Listen and Learn
- The Norrsken backstory: how 3 unicorn founders started 6 years ago a one-stop shop for impact investing (2:00)
- Agate’s views on the Climate Tech scene in Sweden and the Nordics (4:50)
- How Stockholm wants to become the global impact capital (5:00)
- The transition from a tech ecosystem to impact ecosystem (5:30)
- The power or role models to scale the ecosystem (6:00)
- How Northvolt’s success led the charge to a booming Swedish electric ecosystem (trucks, airplanes, boats) (7:00)
- What Agate thinks of the “classic VC downturn letter” that most VCs have been issuing to their portfolio companies (9:40)
- Startups with strong fundamentals will remain the best VC cases (11:20)
- Why impact startups might be the most resilient in an economic downturn
- VC investing comes down to two options: vitamins vs painkillers. Impact companies are the painkillers (12:00)
- Is 10 years sufficient as a time-horizon for deeptech hardware solutions? (13:00)
- Why Norrsken looks for deep tech startups that have immediate pent-up demand (14:00)
- The one area where Agate has completely changed her mind in the past 2 years (17:10)
- Why Norrsken’s biggest mistake was to fall in love in something else other than the team (18:00)
- Agate’s tips to people that want to break into Climate Tech and join a startup (22:50)
- The 700 Climate tech jobs listed on Norrsken’s job board with (24:00)
- Why the hardest part is to break into the Climate community and why it gets much easier to transfer between companies once you understand the climate ecosystem (25:00)
- How Norrsken runs investment decisions (27:40)
- The 1-to-1 correlation between financial and impact returns (29:00)
Show Links
- Norrsken VC
- Norrsken Foundation
- Niklas Adalberth
- Stockholm Mayor: “We want to be the impact capital of the world”
- Northvolt (building Europe’s largest EV battery gigafactory)
- Einride (electric trucking)
- Heart Aerospace (electric airplanes)
- Candela (electric boats)
Nordics funds list:
- Norrsken VC (Sweden)
- Pale Blue Dot (Sweden)
- 2150 (Denmark / UK)
- Climentum Capital (Denmark)
- Nordic Foodtech (Finland)
- Voima Ventures (Finland)
- Trellis Ventures (Sweden)
- Trellis Road (Sweden)
- Katapult (Norway)
- Summa Equity (Sweden)
- Almi Invest (Sweden - Public fund)
- Helen Ventures (Norway - CVC)
- Yara Growth Ventures (Norway - CVC)
- Vestas Ventures (Denmark - CVC)
- The classic VC downturn letter → Y Combinator infamous letter to their portfolio companies
Carveouts
- 700 climate impact jobs listed on Norrsken VC’s job board https://www.norrsken.org/jobs
50 episodes
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