OpenOcean, a European VC which has tended to concentrate on huge data-oriented startups and deep tech, has attain the €92 million ($111.5 million) mark for its third fundamental enterprise fund, and is aiming for a remaining shut of €130 million by mid-way this yr. LPs within the new fund embrace the European Funding Fund (EIF), Tesi, pension funds, main household workplaces and Oxford College’s Corpus Christi Faculty.
Ekaterina Almasque — who has already led investments in IQM (superconducting quantum machines) and Sunrise.io (multi-cloud hyper-converged infrastructure) and is main the London staff and operations for the agency — has been appointed as basic associate. Earlier than becoming a member of, Almasque was a managing director at Samsung Catalyst Fund in Europe, led investments in Graphcore’s processor for Synthetic Intelligence, Mapillary’s layer for fast mapping and AIMotive’s autonomous driving stack.
The large wealth of information within the fashionable world means the subsequent technology of software program is being constructed on the infrastructure. Thus, the fund mentioned it will make investments primarily on the Collection A stage with preliminary investments of €3 million to €5 million, throughout OpenOcean’s precept areas of synthetic intelligence, application-driven knowledge infrastructure, clever automation and open supply.
OpenOcean’s staff consists of Michael “Monty” Widenius, the “religious father” of MariaDB, and one of many authentic builders of MySQL, the predecessor to MariaDB; Tom Henriksson, who invested in MySQL and MariaDB; in addition to Ralf Wahlsten and Patrik Backman.
Tom Henriksson, basic associate at OpenOcean, commented: “Ekaterina… brings an immense quantity of experience to the staff and exemplifies the best way we need to help our founders. Fund 2020 is a crucial step for OpenOcean, with prestigious LPs trusting our method and our information, and believing in our means to determine the easiest knowledge options and infrastructure applied sciences in Europe.”
Almasque mentioned: “The subsequent 5 years shall be vital for digital infrastructure, as breakthrough applied sciences are at present being constrained by the capabilities of the stack. Enabling this subsequent stage of infrastructure innovation is essential to realising digitisation tasks throughout the economic system and can decide what the web of the longer term appears like. We’re excited by the potential of world-leading companies being constructed throughout Europe and are wanting ahead to supporting the subsequent technology of software program leaders.”
Chatting with TechCrunch she added: “It’s very uncommon to seek out such a VC so deep within the stack which additionally invested in one of many first unicorns in Europe and actually constructed the open supply ecosystem globally. So for me, this was completely an fascinating staff to hitch. And what OpenOcean was doing since inception in 2011 was very distinctive amongst pioneering ecosystems, comparable to huge knowledge analytics… and it stays very pioneering, pushing the frontiers in synthetic intelligence and now quantum computing. That is what actually attracts me, and I feel there’s a very, very huge future.”
In an interview Henriksson advised me: “What we’re seeing is that our economic system is shifting increasingly in the direction of the digital, data-driven economic system. It began with few industries, however now we see a bigger shift, together with new industries like healthcare, like manufacturing.”
Requested concerning the results of the pandemic on the sector, he mentioned: “Clearly we see a variety of startups who’re plugging into issues just like the UiPath platform. That is very related for the pandemic. As a result of the businesses that had began automating strongly earlier than the pandemic hit… they’ve really accelerated they usually discover advantages for his or her groups and organisations and truly the individuals are happier as a result of they’ve higher automation applied sciences in place. Those that didn’t begin earlier than [the pandemic hit] they’re slightly behind now.”
