In the interview to Äripäev Radio Uudam noted that Karma Ventures is usually investing in deeptech startups where founders and teams are already created the technology, have made their first proper sales, are highly valued by customers and quite difficult to copy. Karma’s early-stage investment in a deeptech startup is up to 5 million euros.
Uudam said in the company’s press realease that having a strong background in deeptech and being confident with the technological risks involved, Karma Ventures aims to help founders build companies with positive global impact.
“The Nordic-Baltic region has the highest density of unicorns per capita in Europe. This is creating an inspiring environment for strong deeptech startups. We are excited to leverage our deeptech startup expertise in all of Europe,” added company’s founding partner Kristjan Laanemaa.
Karma’s first fund, created in 2018, had a volume of €70 million, the current second fund is significantly larger at €100 million. Uudam noted that most of the investors of the first fund decided to continue investing. “We are very grateful for the extremely strong vote of confidence from our existing and new investors,” commented Uudam.
Karma Ventures is led by Margus Uudam, Tommi Uhari, and Kristjan Laanemaa. The trio has over a decade of experience both working with, and investing in deeptech startups with a number of successful exits to Dynatrace (read more here), SAP, and Splunk, to name a few.
Karma’s second fund is backed by Baltic Innovation Fund 2 (BIF 2), an initiative created by cooperation between the Republic of Estonia, the Republic of Latvia, the Republic of Lithuania and European Investment Fund, the founding engineers of Skype, Jaan Tallinn and Ahti Heinla (currently at Starship Technologies), Till Quack (Qualcomm, Apple, Mapillary), Jani Huoponen (Google) and Sergei Anikin (CTO at Pipedrive). They join longstanding investors Isomer, Skype founder’s investment company ASI and the pension funds of Swedbank and LHV.
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