European VC firm OpenOcean, an investor in data solutions and software, has announced a €92M raise for its third main venture fund. According to the VC firm, “new fund will look to invest in Europe’s most exciting and disruptive data businesses that are resolving digitalisation bottlenecks and building the future data economy.”
The LPs in the new fund include European Investment Fund, Tesi, Fund of Fund Growth (pension funds), further institutions, major family offices, and Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College.
Fund 2020
Fund 2020 is OpenOcean’s third main institutional fund, following €45M and €80M funds in 2011 and 2015 respectively. The firm targets a final close of €130M for H1 2021. “The fund will invest primarily at the Series A level with initial investments of €3M to €5M, across OpenOcean’s core target areas of artificial intelligence, application-driven data infrastructure, intelligent automation, and open source,” mentions the firm in a press release.
New Appointment
Along with the new funding, OpenOcean has also announced that the appointment of Ekaterina Almasque – former MD of Samsung Catalyst Fund – as General Partner. She has been hired to accelerate the firm’s investments in AI, data/cloud infrastructure, and quantum computing. At OpenOcean, she has already led investments in IQM (superconducting quantum machines) and Sunlight.io (multi-cloud hyper-converged infrastructure) and is leading the London team and operations for the firm.
“The next five years will be critical for digital infrastructure, as breakthrough technologies are currently being constrained by the capabilities of the stack. Enabling this next level of infrastructure innovation is crucial to realising digitisation projects across the economy and will determine what the internet of the future looks like,” says Almasque.
About OpenOcean
OpenOcean is an early-stage venture capital firm operating across Europe with offices in London, Helsinki, and Amsterdam. It typically leads or co-leads European €5M Series A funding rounds in European B2B software startups.
According to the press release, “OpenOcean’s team has a long and storied entrepreneurial history, with Michael “Monty” Widenius, Ralf Wahlsten, Patrik Backman, and Tom Henriksson building and investing in MySQL and MariaDB. MySQL, which is part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Python/PHP) that helped shape today’s internet, was the first commercially successful open source project and one of the first technology unicorns from Europe.”
It claims to be one of the first VCs in Europe to invest in Big Data analytics software (Import.io, RapidMiner), identity management (TrueCaller), automation (Supermetrics, AppGyver) and DevOps (Bitrise).