Voima Closes $97 Million Science-Based Venture Fund for Tech Startups

Finland’s Voima Ventures has closed a $97 million fund to support deep tech firms.

The fund will back Nordic and Baltic early-stage companies focused on “science-driven entrepreneurship,” Voima said in a Tuesday (June 13) news release.

“Now is the time to scale science-based solutions into action and global markets,” said founding partner Inka Mero in the release. “People want to preserve the planet, and societies need to urgently fix the challenges of aging and health-challenged populations. Science-backed growth entrepreneurship is the only fast enough way to solve pressing global issues, and it is generating a massive value growth opportunity for deep tech startups and VCs.”

The fund is the latest example of how investments in early-stage companies continue to be attractive even as venture capital (VC) companies grow increasingly cautious.

For example, Tuesday also brought the news that Insight Partners is reducing the size of its latest funding from $20 billion to $15 billion, telling investors in a letter that it has witnessed a “great reset in tech.”

Insight — typically considered a bellwether for the VC world — isn’t “seeing a volume of companies that [it is] excited about,” the Financial Times reported.

Although all three stages of funding — early, growth and late — have seen a downturn in funding, early-stage companies have seen the least amount of pullback.

“Late-stage firms took the hardest hit, however, further complicating matters for capital-starved companies as funding had already been on a downward slope these last few quarters,” PYMNTS reported in April.

Zeynep Yavuz, FinTech partner at early-stage VC firm General Catalyst, told PYMNTS the same month that for growth-stage companies, it’s no longer a question of whether they are overvalued, but rather a question of whether they have time to grow into the valuation at which they’re pegged.

She said early-stage companies not facing that challenge must implement best practices from scratch. Besides, there’s still a lot of dry powder in Europe aimed at young firms, leading to a fertile environment to fuel their growth.

“I believe it’s an amazing time to build a company, and because the funding market has slowed down in the growth and late-stage space, a lot of the capital is shifting to early-stage,” she said at the time.