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OpenOcean is an early-stage venture capital and private equity firm investing in B2B software across Europe. OpenOcean's key expertise and investment focuses within data-intensive software are artificial intelligence and machine learning, application-driven infrastructure and development tools, open source software, and automation software. The company has offices in London, Helsinki, and Amsterdam and focuses on global companies delivering data-intensive and delicious software solutions. OpenOcean typically leads or co-leads €5M Series A funding rounds in Europe. As of January 2020, OpenOcean has made fifty six investments and two exits.
The firm was started in 2009 by founders and early investors of MySQL, Michael "Monty" Widenius, Patrik Backman, and Ralf Wahlsten, and later joined by former Nokia executive Tom Henriksson. Richard Muirhead joined the OpenOcean general partnership in 2015 after serving as interim CEO at Automic before it was acquired by CA Technologies; he left in 2018 to found Fabric Ventures. In 2019, Ekaterina Almasque joined the OpenOcean general partnership from the investment team at Samsung.
OpenOcean funds companies that are based in the United States and Europe, with a focus on the Nordic and Baltic regions. The firm specializes in Series A investments. It provides funding for companies in these industries: enterprise software, big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, adtech, and fintech. Since 2011, the firm has managed to raise a fund total of €149 million across three funding rounds. Its last one was raised in September 2018, amassing €24 million.
Notable investments made by OpenOcean include Bitrise, Thimble, MariaDB, Truecaller, RapidMiner, Platform.sh, EyeEm, Import.io, Nosto, PassFort, Supermetrics, IQM, Leadoo, MindsDB, Vero Analytics, and Sunlight. Their portfolio includes twenty seven companies.
The OpenOcean general partnership currently consists of five partners:
- Michael "Monty" Widenius, General Partner and Founder of MySQL and MariaDB
- Patrik Backman, General Partner and Co-founder of MariaDB
- Ralf Wahlsten, General Partner and Co-founder of MariaDB
- Ekaterina Almasque, General Partner
- Tom Henriksson, General Partner
The firm employs an additional two investment team members in Helsinki, two in London and one in Amsterdam, as well as three operational and marketing professionals.
