Founder factories are a great indication of a startup ecosystem’s maturity, and VCs are known to actively seek out their alumni. They believe that the experience of scaling a company and taking it past important business inflection points are a great advantage when embarking on a new startup journey.
Simon Bøttkjær, co-founder of Signal, says:“ The rise of founder factories in a cyclical funding environment is sparking a talent war. Early-stage VCs are proactively engaging with high-potential talent from founder factories to establish a relationship early in case they decide to create a new company. We also see that in the data points VCs are asking for from our data platform.”
While Sweden continues to take a strong lead in producing founder factories across the Nordics, successful Danish startups like Unity, Trustpilot and Tradeshift have significantly increased the number of Danish founders with alumni backgrounds. Maybe most notably with Pleo, whose founders Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra were both early employees at Tradeshift. They are now fostering a new generation of founders.
With more than ten years of VC experience, Helle Uth, our founding partner at PSV Tech, is delighted with the development of Danish founder factories: “As an investor in companies’ pre-product/market fit, we are seeing a significant increase in the number of new Danish founders with operator experience from successful startups. This is proof that Denmark’s startup ecosystem has matured considerably and that we have succeeded in developing a value chain that can foster startups from early inception to late stage”.
As a highly seasoned investor, PSV benefits from its long-standing involvement in the Danish startup ecosystem. Several of PSV Tech’s portfolio companies were founded by entrepreneurs with operational experience from prior PSV investments. PSV was an early investor in Trustpilot, one of Denmark’s largest founder factories. Senior operators from Trustpilot later founded companies such as Openli and Dreamdata, which are now part of PSV Tech Fund I. The fund also invested in Yaak Technologies, co-founded by Martin Zielinski, a former R&D executive at Unity, Denmark’s leading founder factory.
At PSV Tech, we have worked with the VC data platform Signal to analyse the data and identify the largest founder factories in Sweden and Denmark.
Signal, which helps VCs and investors make data-driven investment decisions, was founded by former PSV employees Simon Bøttkjær and Jacob Houlberg, who helped build our data setup.
Go and read about what it means to Openli CEO and co-founder Stine Mangor Tornmark. She was an early employee at Trustpilot before she founded the company herself.
