Copenhagen's PSV Tech closes €56m second fund for Nordic pre-seed founders

PSV Tech, a Copenhagen venture fund, has held the final close of its second fund at €56m. The money will go to Nordic start-ups in AI, software and digital infrastructure at the stage before they have found product-market fit, and the fund is widening its reach from Denmark to Sweden and Norway.

The close is a vote for the very earliest stage of the market, at a time when much of Europe's funding debate is about the shortage of growth capital.

Who is behind it

PSV Tech launched in 2020 as part of PSV, a venture house whose roots go back 25 years to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). PSV says it has made close to 500 early-stage investments over that time. The fund's general partners are Helle Uth, Richard Breiter, Alexander Viterbo-Horten and Christel Piron.

Two new limited partners join Fund II: Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker and Nordea-fonden. They sit alongside returning backers including the Danish pension fund ATP, the state investment fund EIFO and IDA, plus a group of Danish tech founders: Templafy's Christian Lund and Henrik Printzlau, Morten and Niels Ebbesen of Siteimprove, and Sebastian Knutsson, a co-founder of King.

How the fund invests

Fund II has already made 19 investments since its first close, 11 of them this year and not yet announced, across Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The first fund made 47 investments and has had six exits, including Helloflow and Heyhack. Two of its early bets, Teton and Spektr, have since raised Series A rounds of $20m each.

At pre-seed, there is usually little product or revenue to judge, so the fund bets on teams. Uth said the key test is how founders react when the plan stops working, because it always does. She said AI lets companies do more with smaller teams, and that PSV is also seeing more start-ups emerge from research labs with their own technology and IP.

She also argued that the best AI product will not automatically win. In her view, distribution matters as much: the team that reaches customers and becomes part of their daily work may beat one with better technology. PSV's link to DTU gives it access to engineering talent and research spin-outs.

The case for funding the start of the pipeline

Uth framed the fund as a counterweight to Europe's focus on later-stage money. Europe is right to worry about the lack of scale-up capital, she said, but without enough early funding there will be no scale-ups to invest in.

She pointed to Stockholm as a model, where successful founders, experienced operators, universities and investors feed each other, and said Denmark is starting to show the same pattern, with senior people from big Danish successes leaving to start companies and earlier founders backing new ones. The aim of Fund II is to make that cycle work across the Nordics.

Both new investors described the commitment as long-term support for Danish innovation. Nordea-fonden, which already backs PSV's deep-tech fund PSV Hafnium, said it expects an attractive return while supporting future growth companies.

The size of the fund

PSV Tech announced the final close at €56m; some early reports put it at €55m. At that size, the fund is built for many small cheques, not large rounds, in keeping with its stated aim to be the best at being early, not the biggest.

Cheques at this stage are small, so the fund can spread its bets widely across three countries and keep reserves for follow-on rounds in the companies that make progress. The next test is the 11 unannounced companies in the new fund, and whether more of them follow Teton and Spektr into sizeable Series A rounds.