Are you an awesome startup? Can you see yourself speedboat racing on the Gulf of Finland? Boy, do we have the contest for you.
Open Ocean Capital, to celebrate the first closing of its Fund Three at €40 million (approximately $60 million), is announcing Friday a new startup competition. The winning startup team will be treated with an all-inclusive summer visit to Finland, where they will not only gain insight from the Open Ocean partners, but also just enjoy some leisurely activities.
“Like a lot of people in our business, we work hard and we play hard,” said Patrik Backman, Opean Ocean Managing Partner. “However, as venture capitalists that were once founders, we want to stress that we come into this in a very untraditional way and we’re looking for a different kind of venture partner that is doing for their industry what MySQL did for web databases."
"More than anything, we really want to bond with those start-ups we choose to invest in and make sure they know they are more than just some numbers in a ledger to us.”
Before moving on to Open Ocean, Backman led MySQL AB's global engineering team and managed the company’s strategic technical alliance with SAP AG. Backman’s fellow partners and colleagues--Ralf Wahlsten, Tom Henriksson and Michael "Monty" Widenius--are all former MySQL and Nokia executives.
If you think your startup has what it takes, and if you think you could stand to hang out with those guys in Finland for some undetermined length of time, then this is the competition for you.
Though Open Ocean typically focuses on European software startups developing user community or open-source business models, the competition is open to any startup in any region working on any kind of service. What they’re looking for are game-changers, truly disruptive companies.
Current portfolio companies include SkySQL, WOT, MoSync, Vaadin, Chat Republic and Ironstar Helsinki.
Startups that would like to enter the contest must submit their pitches, including a maximum five-slide presentation and three minute video, by June 15 at the latest. Though Open Ocean hasn’t said this specifically, I can bet that a winning video will not only highlight the startup’s amazing product and brilliant business model with a user-base to back it, but also show off the awesomeness of the team behind that business.
More information should be up on the Open Ocean Capital site by tomorrow, though interested candidates can contact Tom Henriksson directly.
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Open Ocean Capital is the leading investor in Community and Open Source Business. With hands-on assistance and funding, the Open Ocean team uses its broad and deep experience from MySQL AB and similar highly successful business cases to help start-ups with established user bases build scalable global businesses.
We believe that a multi-stage investment model is best for developing the start-up to global success. Our typical initial investment is 0.5-1M€, with one or several follow-on investments tied to growth targets. The maximum investment is 6M€ per portfolio-company.
With this investment focus, Open Ocean launched Fund Three in May 2011 with 40 M€ in capital in the first closing. We are currently working on a second closing, targeting 60M€ in total for the fund.
Open Ocean was originally established in Luxemburg, as Open Ocean S.à.r.l. by the MySQL founders (Michael Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson) as the holding company for their joint ownership in MySQL AB. Ralf Wahlsten and Berndt Karsten invested in Open Ocean S.à.r.l. and MySQL AB, while helping the MySQL founders with the initial growth phases of MySQL AB.
After the MySQL AB acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Open Ocean was transformed into a venture capital operation and moved to a Finland-based entity, owned by the Open Ocean Capital management team. The team launched the first fund in 2008, which has invested in six companies. The name of this investment fund was chosen to be Open Ocean Fund Two, to reflect the history of the company as one of the main owners in MySQL AB (Open Ocean “One”).
