Episode Details

Investing in the Future How three women from Iceland launched Crowberry Capital, a Nordic venture capital fund seeking to support the next generation of creative entrepreneurs.

To be boldly creative, you often have to strike out on your own adventure. So that’s exactly what Hekla Arnardottir, Helga Valfells, and Jenny Ruth Hrafnsdottir did.

While working together at an investment capital fund, the three women noticed a pressing need for more early-stage funding in their region. The trio wondered if they could not only meet that need, but also create something exciting and visionary by launching a private fund of their own.

In 2017, they took the leap, and set out to launch Crowberry Capital, a Nordic venture capital fund with its sights set on supporting creative technological advancements in spaces ranging from gaming to health.

No matter the field, their goal was to help young and promising Nordic companies (in Iceland and Sweden) grow into global brands. And just two years later, they already have 10 startups under their wing.

There were, of course, many steps in between the launch and the fund’s present day success. For one, before a fund can start scouting new talent to back, it needs a whole lot of cash to invest in the first place.

Cold Calls

As you might imagine, launching a venture capital fund isn’t cheap. But you might be surprised to learn that venture capitalists don’t necessarily need to have their own personal wealth to get started (although it certainly helps). VC firms offer financial and other forms of support to early stage companies with high potential for growth, often deploying assets from other sources—wealthy individuals, banks, other investment funds, etc.

Although Arnardottir, Valfells, and Hrafnsdottir knew many of the institutional investors in Iceland and had impeccable reputations, they still found themselves cold calling smaller investors. They even spread word through the media that they were launching the fund.

“We went out early in the process to the local media and said we were going raise this fund,” Hrafnsdottir says. “So we sort of got it out in the open. Of course, that increases the risk that if you fail, you fail publicly, but we took that risk.”

Although they acknowledged the risk, for them, failure was never an option.

“That’s why it’s great to be three,” Valfells says. “There was always at least one optimist.”

That process of raising capital also gave the team a fresh perspective on life as an entrepreneur.

“It made us more empathetic toward entrepreneurs, because you realize you just have to cold call rich people you’ve never met and say, ‘Would you like to invest in my fund?’” Valfells recounts with a laugh.

Being on the “selling side,” as she puts it, helped them to recognize more clearly what it takes to pitch effectively and reemphasized the importance of passionate energy, lessons they carried forward into choosing where to invest once the fund was up and running.

But despite the daily strain of cold calling for investments, Valfells says that living in Iceland took away much of the stress others might experience in their position.

“There’s a great safety net,” Valfells says. “Everybody has access to childcare and school and healthcare, so I think you’re willing to take a risk with your professional life because you know there’s a safety net that catches you.”

She says that this safety net makes walking away from stability much easier and, because of that, creativity is free to flourish. And by extension, people are more liberated to do what they love.

“I think we’ve all made sacrifices in the sense that we’ve turned down higher paying jobs and jobs with more security, but it hasn’t been a sacrifice because this is what we love doing,” Valfells says.

After six months of phone calls and meetings, they had raised $40 million, and Crowberry Capital was ready to