Creandum’s eighth fund has closed at $750M (€668M), the largest in the Stockholm firm’s 23-year history and well above the €500M it raised for its seventh fund in 2024. The early backer of Spotify and Klarna has also opened a full office in San Francisco.
Creandum invests at seed and Series A, the first rounds of outside funding a startup takes on, and will split the new money evenly between new companies and follow-on rounds, the further investments it makes in startups it already backs. Partner Fredrik Cassel said around 30 institutional investors from the United States and Europe had put money into the fund, though the firm has not named them. He expects Creandum to make about 30 new investments over the next two years.
Founder and partner Staffan Helgesson said nearly 25 years in venture capital had only strengthened his belief that the founders a firm backs early matter most. He said the new fund is about “finding the boldest and most ambitious early-stage founders in Europe”, and increasingly in the United States.
A Bigger Push In San Francisco
Creandum has had staff in San Francisco since 2012, and the new office makes that presence permanent. The firm says the US team will work alongside colleagues in Stockholm, London and Berlin, giving founders one partner across Europe and the United States.
Creandum points to how one-sided transatlantic funding has become. By its count, roughly half of all capital invested in European tech over the past year came from the United States, while very little US tech funding came from Europe.
“As US venture firms increasingly compete for deals in Europe, Creandum is expanding its work in San Francisco,” the firm said.
US firms are not the only outsiders looking for European deals. Sky9 Capital, a Singapore firm with roots in backing Asian startups, announced its first European office in September at Station F, a startup campus in Paris. European investors are raising fresh money too, and Belgian firm Entourage closed a €100M second fund last week to back AI and robotics startups.
From Spotify To Lovable
Creandum was an early investor in Spotify and payments firm Klarna. Its portfolio has also included card-payments company iZettle, fashion marketplace Depop, trading app Trade Republic and ride-hailing firm Bolt, while many of its newer investments are in AI.
The best known of those newer bets is Lovable, a Stockholm company whose tools let people build apps by describing them in plain language. Lovable raised $400M at a $13.3B valuation in August.
Creandum has also backed Black Forest Labs, the German developer of image-generation models, along with AI computing platform Modal and accounting software company Rillet. Another holding, Emulate, was set up by former Google DeepMind researchers to build world models: AI systems that learn to simulate how the physical world behaves. Cassel said the firm’s AI investments have, on balance, paid off so far.
The new fund keeps Creandum backing companies at their earliest stages, as it did with Spotify and Klarna. What changes is its reach, with a permanent San Francisco office now looking for American founders while US investors look for deals in Europe.
