Northzone leads $8m series-A for FishBrain

Tokyo-based Recruit Strategic Partners No 6 and New York's Novel TMT Ventures joined as new backers of FishBrain, while existing investors Active Venture Partners, Industrifonden, GP Bullhound and Edastra Venture Capital also participated in the round.

The fresh funding comes a year after FishBrain first raised substantial capital, and will be used to establish an office in the US and build the company's presence in the country, as well as launch the service in Japan.

At $8m, FishBrain's round was substantially above the average series-A investment in the Nordic region, where the average is $5.65m and the median is $5m, according to an analysis by The Nordic Web.

Similarly, the analysis also shows the time between FishBrain's seed round in July 2014 to its series-A was shorter than the average for Nordic start-ups, which average 15.2 months from seed to series-A.

Previous funding
FishBrain's most recent round puts the amount of capital it has raised at more than $10.5m, having received a $2.5m early-stage round in July 2014.

With Industrifonden having led an earlier investment, new backers who joined in July last year included Northzone, Active, GP Bullhound and Edastra.

Company
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Gothenburg, FishBrain is a social network for anglers, with apps on iOS and Android that launched in 2013.

In addition to a social network where anglers can log and share their catches, the service offers a fish forecasting feature that predicts the optimal time, place and bait to catch particular species of fish in any given location using meteorological information and crowd-sourced data.

FishBrain claims to have a million users worldwide, compared to 430,000 when it last raised venture funding.

People
Northzone investment manager Tim He led the deal for the VC. Investment manager Per Anell worked on the deal for Industrifonden. Johan Attby is the CEO and co-founder of FishBrain.

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