Creandum closes Fund III on €135m

The fund was placed by Asante Capital. Andulf provided legal advice.

Creandum was set up in late 2002 by The Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund (AP6) and assurance company Skandia Life with SEK 300m. That fund had a two-year investment period and three-year fund term.

The team have returned total capital on that fund and value remains. Management bought itself out in 2006 and raised a new SEK 750m fund with backing from the two former parent LPs and four new investors.

Investors
Creandum Fund III's final close comes after a first close was reached on €92.5m last May, with a €7.5m injection from Finnish Industry Investment. Fund III comprises 11 investors, with approximately 50% of the capital coming from Sweden and the rest from elsewhere in Europe. Only one investor from Fund II did not re-up into Creandum III.

Creandum closed its second fund in February 2007 on its SEK 750m hard-cap after a reported 100 days' fundraising, according to unquote" data. The firm set up as a Guernsey LP as well as a Swedish KB in order to attract a wider base of investors; ultimately two thirds came from outside Sweden.

Investments
Fund III will invest up to €10m in businesses in a first round or seed round. There are six deals already in the fund, with roughly half seed investments and the other half A-rounds. There are 13 businesses in Fund II; two are write-downs while six could prove to be homeruns, according to a source.

The fund's latest deal was a proprietary investment in April, when Creandum backed Norway's Xeneta, a shipping information business. Prior to that, the firm teamed up with Lifeline Ventures to pump $2.9m into Nonstop Games, a Finland- and Singapore-based games business.

Creandum is very focused on consumer technology and has been counting Spotify among its portfolio companies since 2008 – it was the company's first institutional backer.

Creandum pumped $1m into Danish wine app Vivino in December. That series-A round followed a seed round in 2011 from Seed Capital and Skype co-founder Janus Friis.

People
Fraser von Rensburg led the fundraising for Asante. Staffan Helgesson, Martin Hauge and Johan Brenner lead Creandum.

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