The past few years have seen unprecedented growth in Edtech. The pandemic has undoubtedly revealed an even greater societal need for education innovation and a higher willingness to pay for tech-enabled education. The education sector is expected to be a US$7.3tn global opportunity by 2025 and we see a lot of room for further Edtech growth with compelling secular tailwinds such as population growth in emerging markets, improving education levels worldwide and workforce reskilling and upskilling.

The global edtech market is now forecast to grow at 16% per year to reach approximately US$404bn by 2025. This session will focus on:

• A discussion on valuation, investing and acquisition trends in Edtech
• How key players are assessing the space moving into a post-pandemic world
• Learnings on Edtech from the past few years and Edtech areas of opportunity in the short and long-term, globally
• Overall, what are we excited about ?

This roundtable is hosted by Denis Nikolaev, Head of EdTech Investments for Prosus.

The VC ecosystem still has a diversity problem. Underrepresented founders are overlooked because investors only tap into their own privileged networks. The result is that VC firms are doing the exact opposite of what they are set up to do – missing opportunities.

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. VCs can change this by embracing inclusion and intersectionality.  This roundtable will share practical advice about how to create inclusive environments and how to support inclusive founders.

This roundtable is hosted by Sarah Finegan, Director at Antler.

The Nordics are leading the impact investing game. It’s time to back this claim with data showing the effects of impact investments in the real world, as metrics focusing solely on operational excellence no longer suffice.

Impact data provider Upright and impact investor Norselab invites you to a lively discussion on the intrinsic tie between impact and commercial success, and why companies’ core products and services should be central to measuring the impacts of impact investing.

The roundtable is hosted by Maria de Perlinghi (Partner Impact & Communications, Norselab) & Annu Nieminen (Founder & CEO, Upright).

In recent months, the volume of large late-stage VC investments has showed signs of slowing down globally. We discuss the current market situation, the looming threat of down rounds and the entrance of more investor-friendly deal terms in Nordic late-stage VC investments.

This roundtable is hosted by Kimmo Reina from Bird & Bird.

The use of data has changed from nice-to-have to must-have. Whether you are a big hungry programmatic growth investor or an artisanal seed investor, data has become indispensable to not missing opportunities. All investors are collectively looking to invest earlier and earlier; the lines between early stage, late growth and even public investing are blurring.

This roundtable is hosted by Pau Vidal and Yoram Wijngaarde from Dealroom.

In an ever fragmented healthcare industry, will verticals of each segment rule the roost or will we find one ring to rule them all?

Discover more with Samantha Jérusalmy, Partner at Elaia who covers Digital Life Sciences with investments in Lynxcare & Tilak Healthcare.

Deep tech businesses are difficult to benchmark against more consistent SaaS or consumer models. A discussion on milestones, fundraising strategies, and team/board building for early stage emerging science & technology.

This roundtable is hosted by Archie Muirhead from IQ Capital.

Look forward to discussing:

• What are the longer trends on debt leveraging?
• Venture market cool-down effects
• Small extension rounds, convertible notes, avoiding down rounds – where is the focus?
• What is available on the debt side? What works?

This roundtable will be hosted by Vesa Riihimäki from Nordea.

Although fintech has been hit the hardest in the public markets, we still believe it’s ‘long live fintech!, especially in the infrastructure space.

We’re inviting you to discuss the opportunities, including crypto & trading enablement, new payments infrastructure & FinOps, open & real-time data (far beyond banking), and more.

This roundtable is hosted by Olga Shikhantsova, Partner at Speedinvest.

Europe is the birthplace to some of the biggest industrial, logistic and robotics companies in the world. The continent’s combined industrial and logistics turnover was estimated to be $11 trillion in 2020, and investments in industrial tech has grown by 8.8x in the last six years.

Yet, despite the industry’s huge potential, industrial tech funding is still lagging. Let’s discuss the current state of European industrial tech and if and how Europe can supercharge the next wave of global industrial tech leaders.

This roundtable is hosted by Christian Noske, Partner at NGP Capital.

The times of cheap capital & zero interest rates are over, and funds as well as founders have to quickly adjust to a new reality. Many founders (&VCs) have only seen the high times of the last 2-3 years, or have gotten fully accustomed to them.

To many, the last six months have been like waking up with a massive hangover after a big party, with some being reluctant to sober up as quickly as potentially necessary.

This session will focus on:

• Which advise to give to which companies? Where to press ahead, where to suggest a more positive stance?
• How to work with founders who are less quick to accept and adjust to new market environments? How to deal with ‘yes, but we are different/this does not affect us’?
• How to deal with the real implications of sharply decreasing valuation levels e.g. on employee incentives, equity stories, etc.

This roundtable is hosted by Fabian Gruner, Principal at HV Capital.

Deciding to invest internationally is exciting, but new markets mean new challenges.

Please join NEA’s Philip Chopin and Luke Pappas for a conversation on lessons learned and best practices to growing and managing an investment team and portfolio across multiple geographies.

Thanks to world class infrastructure, the Nordic and Baltic region produces a record number of good fintech companies. However very few are able to take the next step and scale outside of the region where the underlying infrastructure is not as reliable.

Inventure’s Gwen Sandberg, previously the Global Head of SMB and Growth at Tink (acquired by Visa for €1.8 billion) will lead a discussion on how to identify those who can make that international leap and go from good to great.

Startups with a compelling narrative have a much easier time with sales, hiring, fund-raising and getting great press. But founders often struggle to construct a memorable story about who they are, often because they are too close to the business to see what’s really significant.

This is where VCs can come in with a helping hand. But what’s the best advice to give to founders on shaping a narrative? Find out at this roundtable with Michael Stothard, an investor at firstminute capital who previously spent 5 years at the founding editor of Sifted.eu, where he saw tens of thousands of startups selling their stories.

Businesses still transact with each other through e-mails, phones, or even fax. The next generation of B2B Marketplaces is setting out to change this — and we have seen some great success stories out of Europe already: Sennder, Ankorstore, Cargo One, and others.

Let’s discuss which markets work for a B2B Marketplace, how to scale them from Europe, and how SaaS or Fintech enablement can actually work.

This roundtable is hosted by Javier Valverde from Prosus & Andreas Helbig from Atomico.

The times where solely financial returns mattered are behind us – on top of financial performance, investors now want to see positive impact. Sometimes addressing the impact can be straightforward, but in the context of early stage startups that are in the product development phase, the impact framework gets more complex.

In this roundtable, we discuss how early stage startups can build a meaningful impact framework. We’ll also elaborate on challenges and opportunities in different industry verticals.

This roundtable is hosted by Inka Mero, Parter at Voima Ventures.

Over the course of 2022, we have seen valuation for public high growth companies and start-ups fall significantly. Last year we discussed how a rising valuation environment and an influx of new funds was changing VCs’ strategy.

This year we will discuss the reversal and how funds are adopting their strategies in a more challenging investment environment.

This roundtable is hosted by Martin Ericsson from Eight Roads.

The markets have not been kind in the recent months and there is still a lot of uncertainty ahead.

We have all worked with our founders to navigate through challenges they hadn’t faced before – from layoffs, to pivots, to raising extensions and more.

In this open discussion, we’ll talk about the types of scenarios we’ve encountered and what we’ve done to help our portfolio companies navigate them. We’ll also talk about how we can help our founders see around corners, and and how to be more proactive vs reactive in the coming year.

This roundtable is hosted by Cleo Sham, Partner at Stride VC.

Through the use of AI technology, VCs have the opportunity to find tech founders outside their usual networks.

At the roundtable, we discuss the pros and cons of using AI in early-stage investing and explain how it makes the decision-making process for VCs more efficient, accurate and less biased. We also speak about trends and new deep tech industries that will shape the tech sector until 2030.

This roundtable is hosted by Eva-Valérie Gfrerer, Founder & CEO of Morphais. 

Why do early stage funds remain so confident when the later stage funds have pulled back? After raising the A, should companies still focus on winning the market, or does capital efficiency affect the Series B. And has the reaction to the Adobe/ Figma deal killed the halo of protection in software?

This roundtable will be hosted by Ed Lascelles, Partner at Albion VC.

This roundtable will be hosted by Teija Nousiainen from Nordea.

While for many years, big industrials have been using CV and M&A to amplify their innovation ambitions instead of relying on their R&D functions alone, some have been more successful than others. How does Corporate Venturing fare these days and are investors getting wary of the equity option as opposed to normal commercial agreements? We discuss the latest trends in CV and what makes for a successful CV investment.

This roundtable will be hosted by Iina-Mari Supperi & Martin Folke from Bird & Bird.

This roundtable is hosted by Viet Le from La Famiglia.

It may seem difficult for small deep tech start-ups to get a foot in and make an impact becoming true thought leaders in the industry. Luckily there are some key insights based on their customer universe that lead to specific GTM and funding strategy.

Backed by my own experience of creating one of the leading mobile camera tech companies, and having invested in deep tech companies let’s engage in:

• What is in the core of the virtuous cycle in deep tech?
• How to create specific GTM based on the customer universe?
• How does road to value determine the funding strategy?

This roundtable is hosted by Sami Niemi, Partner at Spintop Ventures.

Discuss the following questions in a roundtable hosted by Peter Votkjaer Jorgensen & Mathilde Lyet from Maersk Growth:

• What is the most significant impact potential to achieve 2030 targets (basis 1.5 degrees increase) / what are the main prohibitors?
• Is climate tech an investment paradigm shift towards hardware / how does it compare to the last decade’s massive software focus?
• What is the role of non-purely VC financial investors in climate tech, e.g. CVCs and more patient investors?
• If you had one wish for next-generation climate technology, what would it be, and what?

In this “VC insider” confidential roundtable, we will talk candidly and share experiences about what it takes to build a great venture firm, running through all the elements that constitute the operating system of a successful group, from culture and values to decision-making engine; we won’t shy away from covering the difficult topics inherent in partnership dynamics and the long-term nature of the venture game, with a bit of self-deprecation thrown in.

This roundtable is hosted by Fred Destin, Founder of Stride VC.

Institutional investors are allocating to the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem in different ways. Some venture investors firmly believe that token investing is superior to traditional equity investing. Other venture investors struggle with the lack of regulatory clarity and unclear value accrual mechanisms around token investing and instead see value in traditional equity investing.

Structures and governance have been evolving over the last several years to provide investors with upside. Should a token be launched from an existing equity investment in a company?

This roundtable is hosted by Sean Judge from Castle Island.

This round table session will focus on current trends in the investing space. What is top of mind for investors this year and heading into 2023, including macroeconomic conversations, which industries will grow further, and which will have increased hurdles, as well as areas for opportunity and how investors can support their portfolio companies.

This roundtable is hosted by Sandeep Bakshi, Head of European Investments for Prosus Ventures. 

Early stage deep tech companies are often years away from any meaningful revenues, and are lacking KPIs often seen in SW companies. At the same time, the geopolitical turbulence has changed the fundraising environment.

In the first part of this roundtable we’ll focus on discussing milestone setting and relevant KPIs that show progress and validate the opportunity for later stage investors. Then, we’ll turn the focus to relevant investor groups for deep tech startups in today’s fundraising climate.

This roundtable is hosed by Jussi Sainiemi, Partner at Voima Ventures.

Innovations will be needed across every industry if we are to decarbonise at scale and meet net zero by 2050.

However the success of climate technology companies will rely on multiple policy shifts, new financing structures, cross sector expertise, changing consumer preferences and fresh talent.

When is early stage venture capital the right financing? How do we better collaborate with more traditional energy and infrastructure investors when there is a project financing component? What is the role of corporate VCs in scaling these complicated industrial technologies? How do we avoid a repeat of Cleantech 1.0?

The roundtable will be hosted by Siobhan Brewster, Partner at AENU.

We have experienced unprecedented valuations in the tech market in recent years. Newly minted unicorns made headlines almost daily, but alas, now the party is over.

While founders are frontline in this crisis, VCs must take tough decisions when it comes to managing fund reserves and financing round extensions. We have a key role to play in helping founders navigate these times. We must remain transparent and unbiased, in explaining the new norms. It’s in these times that founders will know if they can count on their VC (or not).

Let’s discuss the profitable growth framework(s) and communication best practices to put in place, for the benefit of your portfolio companies and the relationship with your founders.

This roundtable is hosted by Alison Imbert & Elena Moneta, Principals at Partech.

We discuss recent investment instrument trends, such as when to use warrants and convertibles as opposed to equity first investments and contemplate whether ‘founder friendly terms’ are really that friendly to founders. We walk through American-style convertibles e.g. HATCH as SAFE with Nordic characteristics and talk blockchain, including whether tech startups issuing shares will soon be minting NFTs with SHA terms as part of smart contracts.

This roundtable will be hosted by Martin von Haller from Bird & Bird.

The pandemic enabled VCs to spread their geographical scope, but it’s still hard to get into good deals, especially in the early stage, without having feet on the ground. In this workshop we want to hear the experience of using angels as the local scouts:

• What are the pros and cons of working with angels?
• How to network with angels?
• Are results worth the time you invested in creating the connections?

This roundtable will be hosted by Tuomas Pahlman, Angel Investor.

The transportation sector accounts for approx 25% of Europe’s GHG emissions. Unlike other sectors, the transportation sector’s output remains flat without any momentum to go down significantly.

This roundtable discusses investment opportunities arising from the urgent need to decarbonize and where new companies will emerge along the transportation value chain.

This roundtable will be hosted by Christian Noske (NGP Capital) & Jens-Philipp Klein (Rethink Mobility)