Inventure appoints two new Partners

Ekaterina Gianelli & Linus Dahg join the partnership

Inventure appoints two new Partners

Ekaterina Gianelli is the first female to take a partner position in a VC in Finland

Linus Dahg becomes Inventure’s first Partner based out of Sweden

At Inventure, our goal is to support the next generation of Nordic & Baltic entrepreneurs in building their businesses. To succeed in that, we’ve been building a stellar team that we are happy to acknowledge today, as Ekaterina Gianelli and Linus Dahg become Partners at Inventure.

“Both Ekaterina and Linus have been strongly contributing to our vision, and have enriched our founder networks in the region over the past years. We already know what they can bring to the table, and that it is a phenomenal match,” says Sami Lampinen, the Managing Partner at Inventure.

Originally from Moscow and now based out of Helsinki, Ekaterina is the first female partner at Inventure. At 32, she is also the youngest one. She’s already proven herself as an active community builder and a trusted partner to many entrepreneurs. Some of the companies she’s been working with at Inventure include Noona Healthcare (recently acquired by Palo Aalto-based Varian Medical Systems), Klevu and Drugstars.

As a Partner, Ekaterina will continue supporting Nordic founders, building our global networks, and searching for new investment opportunities. Her main areas of interest currently include digital health, new materials, the future of food and consumer services in general.

Linus is our first Partner based outside of Helsinki, with Stockholm as his primary location. The appointment is in line with Inventure’s increased focus on Sweden. We are working on strengthening our presence in the region, and we find Linus instrumental in that.

Over the past years, we’ve seen a strong increase in the number of investment opportunities from Sweden, as well as the number of Swedish portfolio companies. We are happy to see that our efforts to launch the Swedish office are paying off in many ways, as our permanent presence in Sweden was the first step on the way to becoming a truly Nordic fund. As a Partner, Linus will continue working with a number of our portfolio companies, including Wolt, Stravito and Sharin. He will also spend time looking at marketplaces and marketplace technologies, b2b software opportunities and fintech startups.

We’ve been building our own team by identifying gaps and blindspots we have and then looking for people, who can complement us. We have added 7 new people to our team, strongly changing the composition and dynamics: 3 more women, 4 more nationalities, and very different educational backgrounds. In our industry changes take time, but we’ve been taking first steps.

We can already see that diverse team leads to diverse dealflow and portfolio. Out of the 13 investments we’ve made from Fund III, 38% teams had female (co)founders, and more than 20 nationalities were present in the founding teams. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, and will continue building an even brighter future.