Hey there,

Welcome to Sunday CET.

A packed one today, featuring an awesome interview with Neil, an up and coming British investor from Copenhagen, early Lovable backer who just raised $6 million for his third fund:

Great insights - scroll down for it.

Also today - multiple European mega deals, DPIs, why defence tech is hot, OpenAI vs Google and how Europe is shooting itself in the foot (again!).

As always - here for thoughts and comments, hit reply.

Enjoy,
Dragos

We are doing an interview series for taking the pulse of the startup market through the eyes of the investors. This week - Neil S W Murray - founder and solo GP at The Nordic Web Ventures, an up and coming early stage investor out of Denmark.

The Nordic Web Ventures is a first-cheque Nordic fund for possible futures.

I back founders when the market doesn’t believe them yet, when they’re building into “zero-billion-dollar markets” today that could become billion dollar+ markets tomorrow if their view of the future is right.

The core of my thesis is that the biggest outcomes don’t come from sizing today’s markets, but from backing exceptional founders whose insight and conviction allow them to create the market. Ultimately I am assessing whether this is the team that will win if their vision of the future comes to be.

The best Nordic companies I’ve backed have followed this exact pattern, founders whose internal model of the future eventually became everyone else’s model:

Sanity and the future of structured content, SafetyWing and global social infrastructure, and Lovable and AI-native product creation.

My sweet spot is writing the first cheque into founders like these, before consensus forms and while assessing founders and “what if this goes right?” still matters more than proof.

I believe it is crowded in quantity but not quality. The reality of first-money in the Nordics is that a majority of the local pre-seed specific funds simply don’t understand how to invest that early.

Founders relay horror stories to me every week of tranche funding around product goals, 3 years of LTV/CAC projections, 15 people on investment committees and even competency questionnaires!

Funds like these are often leading $1.5M pre-seed rounds, but from what I see the best founders often don’t fit neatly into this definition of what a pre-seed round should look like.

Some raise <$1M syndicates: fast, scrappy, "headless" (h/t Sarah Drinkwater) rounds that bring multiple great people (angels, micro funds, Solo GPs etc) around the table, providing early validation before a breakout seed.

Others raise $3M+ internationally led rounds, skipping the incremental step and going global from day zero.

Pre-seed, as it’s usually practiced, is about the middle. I invest in those extremes.

For me, performance (when it comes to LPs) comes down to one thing: DPI, and the ability to generate 10x-plus multiples, across multiple funds, not just once, and not just on paper. Anyone can have a good mark in a bull market. What matters is returning real capital and proving that the outcome wasn’t accidental.

That’s why discipline matters more to me than demand and I capped my latest fund at $6M despite it being significantly oversubscribed. I have no interest in accumulating AUM for its own sake, because larger funds almost inevitably dilute both decision-making and outcomes.

Where I stand today is very much at the start of that journey. Fund I is tracking at a 10x multiple, Fund II has some way to go, and Fund III has started well out of the blocks with Lovable.

The ambition is to build a repeatable system that produces multiple 10x outcomes and real DPI across funds, not to be complacent and accumulate AUM from backing a few great companies.

A founder should take my money if they want someone who is comfortable making decisions before there’s proof, and who has seen enough early-stage companies to recognise when something feels directionally right.

I’m useful very early: shaping the story, stress-testing assumptions, helping founders avoid obvious early mistakes, and thinking through how the company should look before it starts scaling. I’m not trying to run the company, but I will be direct when something doesn’t make sense.

Over 50% of founders I’ve backed in my first two funds invested back into my latest fund.

That’s probably the most honest signal of value.

Before investment, it’s purely whether I feel the founders have enough clarity and speed to turn ambiguity into momentum.

Eighteen to twenty-four months later, I’m looking for one of three things: clear acceleration, clear product-market direction, or clear evidence that the team can learn and adapt faster than competitors. If none of those are true, it usually doesn’t work.

I’m increasingly attracted to founders who are building the thing they want to exist, rather than starting with a “plug-in, land-and-expand” strategy designed to look good on a pitch deck.

A lot of early-stage companies today are optimised around distribution tactics before the core product really matters. That can work in benign markets, but it tends to break down quickly in hype cycles or downturns, when attention shifts and budgets tighten.

The founders I’m most interested in start from a clear, opinionated vision of what they want to build. They’re usually building something that feels slightly too ambitious early on, but that depth is exactly what gives them durability.

If we are in, or heading into, another hype cycle, I think the companies that survive will be the ones built for the right reasons: not to wedge themselves into an existing stack, but to create something meaningful enough that it earns its place outright.

Robotics is having a real moment in the Nordics right now. You’re seeing founders who combine strong software backgrounds with hardware, automation, and AI in a very pragmatic way. A couple of companies I’ve recently backed here are MAKIINA and Qualia.

I’m also particularly interested in vertical AI companies targeting physical products/industries.

Data in the physical world has not been fully solved by software yet due to how messy, complicated and unstructured it can be, but with AI that is now possible. I just invested in

Complir, started by Gustav Bang who was previously Head of Denmark at Legora and is now building a “Vanta for physical products”.

The number of repeat founders we are seeing right now in the Nordics, who are not just on their second companies, but in some cases their third or fourth.

The alpha continues to get earlier and earlier. By the time founders update their LinkedIn to “Stealth” it’s already too late. At this point, early-stage investing is starting to feel a bit like Minority Report.

The real edge is being close to founders before the idea has fully formed, by being deeply embedded in the ecosystem, regardless of whether they build from here or there.

I have my friend Dan McCormick from Greens Ventures to thank for that. He made an introduction to Anton and we largely connected and bonded over our experiences in Y Combinator (I was in YCW21 with my company and Anton was in YCS20 with Depict) and our company building ideals.

I have thought a lot about whether I was “just lucky” to invest in Lovable and have become comfortable with the following:

I don’t have any heroes in VC but I do have an incredible amount of respect and gratitude for some of Europe’s best investors who have supported me and believed in my potential as an investor from before I even wrote my first cheque and who I have been lucky to (and continue to do so) learn from: Philipp Moehring, Christoph Janz, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and Christian Jantzen.

I have raised from investors from both sides of the Atlantic with my own company and what always stood out to me, especially at first money, was 1) the speed of decision, 2) the lack of ego and not needing to over intellectualise everything, and 3) to use the lens of “what could this be if everything went right?” rather than “what are all the ways this could go wrong?”.

I try to implement these more “US style” behaviours in my own investing and see no reason why these shouldn’t be European ideals as well.

You can read all the interviews here. Who else would you like us to do next? Hit reply with your favorits!

We have screened through 150+ fundraising deals closed in Europe this week.

We archive/transform deal-related data into an easy-searchable intelligent asset at N9, and email a selection of the interesting ones to our customers every week.

Below a recap of the week.

🇩🇪 2na fish - AI platform to measure RNA biomarkers in spatial context
🇩🇰 3RD - AI search visibility platform
🇳🇱 Sensity - AI platform for deepfake detection
🇸🇪 Skygaard - interceptor platform against drone threats

🇫🇷 Harmattan AI made official its last year’s $200M series B at $1B.
🇧🇪 Aikido Security also raised a $60M B at $1B.
🇩🇪 osapiens was priced in at $1B as well over a $100M series C.
🇱🇹 Cast AI did a series C extension at a valuation nearly $1B.
🇩🇪 Parloa raised series D at $3B, 3X from its series C closed nine months ago.
🇩🇪 Egym merged operations with American competitor at $7.5B.

🇸🇪 Klarna launched a P2P payment service.
🇸🇪 Neko Health will open a clinic in NYC.
🇬🇧 Open Cosmos was granted European spectrum for LEO satellites.
🇬🇧 ElevenLabs did a deal with Deutsche Telekom to use AI agents for customer service.
🇫🇷 Mistral signed a content licensing deal for using Wikipedia for training. Also an AI deal with the French army last week.
🇪🇸 Spain announced a €120 billion mega-sovereign fund to be spent on 9 key verticals.
🇩🇰 Novo committed €736 million to life science and quantum startups via BioInnovation Institute, expands program outside DK.

🇬🇧 ElevenLabs made $330 million in ARR at the end of 2025.
🇫🇷 Aircall passed $200 million in ARR at the end of 2025, 2X in three years.
🇬🇧 Balderton did 25X on Fund 5 as it cashed out $2B+ out of Revolut (also nice mention in Industry s04e01).
🇬🇧 Ditto for Index whose 2012 fund had a DPI of 11X while their $780 million 2015 growth fund returned 5.1X, as of late 2025.
🇪🇺 500+ early stage/stealth startups to watch out for in Europe.
🇩🇪 German bankers/investors local IPO expectations this year: Celonis, GetYourGuide, Raisin, Helsing and Quantum Systems.
🤔 Best city to build a startup in Europe - London, Paris, Stockholm or Berlin?
💲 Stripe, Revolut, Deel, Lovable - most sought after Euro startups in secondary deals, as of Q4 2025.
👏 Investors new gigs - quite a few pivoting from tier one mid positions to tech companies.
🦾 Enterprise AI is where’s at - European CEOs are committed to adopting AI and optimist about its ROI.
💡 You’re a startup with cold network - you just need two directories: one of investors and another with Euro startup people already moved to US.
🇪🇺 Myth breaker - European startups must relocate to the US to truly scale big.
📊 European December’s dealflow is trending down.
🇪🇺 Recruiting funnel numbers:

We add more signals on Linkedin and keep a religious track of what’s interesting in Europe on Nordic9.

We produce intel notes for the best investors in Europe every week - join them!

This guide from Deel breaks down how to build one global hiring system. You’ll learn about assessment frameworks that scale, how to do headcount planning across regions, and even intake processes that work everywhere. As HR pros know, hiring in one country is hard enough. So let this free global hiring guide give you the tools you need to avoid global hiring headaches.

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Ukraine has a new defense minister who:

i) is only 34 years old.
ii) has held top-level governmental positions since he was 28.
iii) is a techie, previously in charge with everything top-down in terms of tech modernization of their country.

For an outsider, it sounds like an awesome idea. Here’s an even crazier one - let’s do the same in Bruxelles, and bring in tech-competent people instead of politicians. Jokes aside, not exactly a secret that Ukraine is a hot tech bed in Europe, which is both one of the un-intended war consequences and a Silicon Valley-like opportunity for European tech dynamism. I put together some quick facts below for a better picture:

🤖 Alphabet hit $4 trillion market capitalization this week as Google will offer Gemini for Apple's AI, emerging winner out of a pitch with OpenAI.

FT said OAI actually declined to be Apple's custom model provider and this is broader as Google already pays significant distro fees to Apple for its search engine and browser, all while OpenAI is at war with Google - ICYMI it even declared red alert because of them at the end of last year.

Remarkable how Google has rebounded its AI game in only one year, one more reason for me to root for the OAI challenger, which this week:

💲 UK private equity firms increase use of offshore fund structures, with half of their funds done outside the UK over the past four years, up from roughly a quarter between 2010 and 2015.

🏀 The NBA to pitch investors on a European league with initial team valuation of up to $1B. Btw, a minority stake in the Golden State Warriors is up for sale at a $11B valuation.

❓ Here’s a trivia question - which is the company from below? Hit reply with your answers.

🚩 Evergreen complaints from investors about Germany’s notaries - the problems notaries solve in society today can be fixed in many elegant and efficient ways.

🤯 Europe’s problem is that we’re doing so many un-forced errors, exhibit 268362:

🇬🇧 The City of London is encouraging top bankers, lawyers and executives to push positive messages about the UK to counter rising disinformation about crime that threatens investment in Britain.

💲 Donald J. Trump, Jr. is now advising both Polymarket and Kalshi + Trump Media plans to launch its own betting-style product.

🇪🇺 Europeans favor more China than USA now - fwiw, Americans overseas severely under-estimate how much trust damage the US policy had made in Europe in only 12 months.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

Great, will forward • Good • Meh

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Created every Sunday by @drnovac of Nordic 9 with weekly notes and observations from the European startup ecosystem.

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