Investment strategy

Technology Ventures is an early-stage technology investor focusing on startups originating in northern and eastern Europe. Our typical initial investments involve pre-product launch companies but we prefer to see some sort of early indication that the market will respond to the new product. Investment amounts for initial rounds are as low as a couple of hundred thousand euros and as high as a couple of million euros.

We have a strong preference for business opportunities that scale rapidly in the early phase. Ideally a prospective portfolio company grows rapidly on the input side through crowd-sourcing, user-generated content or the creation of communities, while the output side scales through built-in-product lead-generating features, open-source software license models or plain old word of mouth. With this preference for early high-growth opportunities comes a certain acceptance of business model risk – we accept that monetization sometimes comes after growing your user base.

At Technology Ventures, we believe the global market for web and mobility products offers great opportunities and ferocious competition. In such markets we believe that successful teams can be first-time entrepreneurs, but must be courageous and fully committed to their chosen venture. We also believe that technology entrepreneurship is a repeat business and that everybody wins when parties aspire to be honest and fair in their business agreements.

Turnoffs for us are: businesses that scale linearly with the number of suited sales people deployed, businesses that stop at national borders and require additional teams to enter new markets, businesses that require mountains of cash before demonstrating that they work and that customers love them, businesses that are too complex for a five-minute pitch, and businesses requiring sequential homeruns in different areas before they succeed overall.

Continue reading: Life Science Ventures