Helsinki-based deeptech firm OpenOcean has raised €100m for its fourth flagship fund, with a target to close €130m by the first half of 2025.
The fund, which focuses on data and AI startups, is backed by returning LPs including British fund of funds Isomer Capital, KRR fund of funds, the Finnish ELO pension company and the European Investment Fund. OpenOcean’s general partners say that about 20% of the fourth fund’s LPs are new.
OpenOcean’s bread and butter is AI and data infrastructure startups, but it’s currently chasing specific AI trends: for one, general partners Tom Henriksson and Patrik Backman say they’re eyeing private equity (PE) rollup-style startups — those that buy up a bunch of traditional businesses like clinics and add an AI layer on top to maximise efficiency and margins, a strategy typically employed in PE.
“If you prove that, hey, you can actually take over all these small, boring businesses and optimise from 20% margin to 70%, 80% margin, all of the sudden […] you can build a massive company taking over something that traditionally would have been seen as not a venture thing,” Backman tells Sifted.
Apart from PE-rollup startups, OpenOcean will be looking more into AI applied to biotech, like its recent investment Dreamfold.ai, a protein search and design AI platform based in Canada and one of the first couple of investments made out of the new fund. The new fund will invest in about 18 to 20 companies, mainly in the seed stage — a slightly earlier focus than OpenOcean’s previous funds. It typically writes cheques up to €6m per company.
The firm has backed the likes of Finnish quantum computing startup IQM and Swiss AI startup LatticeFlow, as well as now-insolvent Lithuanian payments startup Kevin.
Selective with AI agents
The new fundraise comes at a time when hot topics like AI agents are booming. But like other VCs, Henriksson is sceptical about some of the earlier iterations of agentic AI: “We’re very happy we actually didn’t invest in any of the ones that we saw, because it became so evident a year, 18 months later that with the acceleration curve we have, the platforms will outpace them innovation-wise,” he argues.
OpenOcean isn’t shunning them, though: instead, Henriksson says “it needs to be very specific, smart agents, probably accessing, understanding a particular unique, proprietary data set better than others. Or maybe it will be something broader that orchestrates different types of agents: AI, automation, various things melding together and something that orchestrates that; that’s a layer we’ve been studying.”
In other words, companies that are making software to manage chains of AI agents within a company — ensuring they’re running efficiently and accurately.
Backman says that “half of the fund” will likely be invested into vertical AI solutions.
‘It’s surprising how difficult the market still is’
Despite the current zeitgeist focusing on AI, Henriksson and Backman say the fundraise hasn’t been a walk in the park. They began raising the fourth fund about a year and a half ago, and report it’s “surprising how difficult the market still is,” Backman says, adding that some LPs are saying they don’t have liquidity or need to reduce fund managers, or that they’re chasing the bigger firms with more capital to deploy.
The pair say that their first fund in 2011 returned 3.35x DPI (distributed to paid-in capital, a measure of LP returns).
“Considering how tricky the market was in ’23 and ’24, we are happy that we have closed €100m and we’re making investments,” Henriksson adds.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/openocean-vc-new-fund/
