Denmark is often framed as a country where businesses are easy to start, but difficult to grow. And for our community, it can sometimes feel like every founder and executive has an Ø in their name. This is the first in a series of columns that aims to give some counterexamples: highlighting positive (and challenging) trends in the Danish startup ecosystem with an emphasis on immigrant contributions. The goal is to provide you with inspiration, resources to start or join a venture, and a “pulse” of what is happening in the Danish startup ecosystem as it might relate to the LWID community.
Summer 2024 saw a number of impressive funding rounds for early stage startups in Denmark.
For science-led tech, Agrobiomics is creating a natural agtech product to help crops resist many of the emerging effects of climate change, such as soil salinity. As part of this research, they secured a 4.3m euro seed round in July after developing and testing their agricultural product at the Novo-funded BioInnovationInstitute over the past two years. Of their five founders, Dr. Ling Ding is their chief science officer. She is originally from China and teaches at DTU in addition to her responsibilities with Agrobiomics. Their funding was organized by Danish VC NOON Ventures, who primarily invest in deep tech life science and energy ventures. (source)
For a more traditional B2B startup, Dealflow is a Danish fintech company that secured an additional 500k euro seed financing round from a consortium of European angel investors. They are cofounded by CTO Sid Mudgal, a Malaysian/Canadian engineer working for the Danish company remotely from Toronto, Canada; and CEO Seb Haugeto, a Norwegian ex-travel influencer turned tech CEO. They had of a rocky start with their original CTO leaving, and Sid stepping up to fill the role as co-founder. However, they also serve as an important example of “WHY Denmark”. In this case, Denmark presented a unique regulatory advantage for Dealflow as a fintech company, enabling its cash distribution business model in a way that would be prohibitive in other European countries.
And finally for something completely different: aParent.ly is a startup focused on non-traditional co-parenting matchmaking services. They are backed by Antler, an idea-stage incubation platform that provides limited pre-seed rounds to explore risky-but-promising ideas. They are founded by Danish CEO Jacob Lennheden and German CTO Anna Liebhoff (source). Apparently is compelling both because it is building infrastructure for family configurations that might not get the same level of support as more traditional models, and demonstrates fundraising at an earlier stage than most — going with a pre-seed platform like Antler to explore future-facing bets and to potentially be “match made” with another founder.
