Photo Credit: Guide to Iceland
Yes, you heard me. Frumtak closed their Frumtak II fund (In Icelandic) and they will be investing in growth stage startups. This is an exciting time to be a Startup Founder in Iceland, we have a choice of 4 venture funds with capacity to invest $90 million now depending on the stage you are in. I am really excited to see how this transpires to building a sustainable startup ecosystem in Iceland. We will find out during Startup Iceland 2015, won’t we? You have bought your ticket right? I have been profiling the roster of speakers in the blog. We are working on finalizing the sponsors and logistics and schedule as I type this.
I believe funding is one of the challenges in building companies, but it is not the most important challenge. I know of teams that have accelerated so fast that they can be selective about who they take money from. I wrote about this before, traction always trumps everything even having $90 million of investable money. I think the next challenge in front of startup community in Iceland is to able to build an Unicorn. They are hard to come by but I believe it can be created here now we have all these funds locally. I say that with a pinch of salt as none of the funds have had major hits or exits, other than DataMarket. I hope we build relationships, knowledge and wisdom to create those unicorns from Iceland. There is a logic behind why we need these unicorns because those creates founders who would want to invest back in the community, like Mr. Jon Von Tetzchner did in Iceland. We have come a long way Iceland, lets keep it classy.
