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2026-07-15 · Investment Banking · Insight

Investing in Deep Tech: Why the Nordic Capital Gap Starts at Pre-Seed

I’ve sat across the table from enough SaaS founders to know the script by heart: a product, a market, a burn rate, and a fund that wants to see traction before it writes a check. Deep tech doesn’t run that script, and my conversation with Anssi Uimonen of Nordic Science Investments — Deep Tech -sijoittaminen | Uimonen | #neuvottelija 343 — was a reminder of how differently this asset class behaves, from the moment of invention all the way to a hoped-for hundred-million-euro exit. A short clip pulled from the same conversation, Anssi Uimonen rahoitus on kriittistä alkuvaiheessa, distills the single point Uimonen kept returning to: funding is critical in the early stage, and the Nordics don’t have enough of it there.

What actually counts as “deep tech”

Uimonen draws the line at a very specific moment: the invention disclosure. That’s the point at which a university researcher has made something and has to decide what happens to it next — publish it as a scientific paper, in which case it becomes freely available to everyone, or start down the path toward a patent and commercialization. “We define Deeptech in such a way as deeptech, that, well, when that… is made there at the university, invention disclosure, then at that stage it can be somewhat evaluated whether to start taking it down the path of commercialization or whether to make a scientific publication out of it” (07:19), he explained. That’s what separates deep tech from the broader “other tech” category, which is more often an application built on top of already-known, already-commonized technology.

Nordic Science Investments positions itself as the university’s partner right at that decision point — before the spin-out company even exists, sometimes years before. Three of the six people on Uimonen’s team have backgrounds in university technology transfer offices; roughly 30% of the founders in the portfolio hold a PhD, and about 30% are women. The firm has made 17 investments and led 15 of them, spanning themes like AI-driven biology and molecular modeling, health technology (Vire, which measures circadian rhythm variation, counts one of Oura’s founders among its investors), novel materials (Nextinox, described as having invented the world’s hardest stainless steel), and food technology (Perfat, which replaces palm oil and animal fats with a healthier substitute that doesn’t require regulatory approval to reach shelves).

A different fund, a different clock

The mechanics matter here as much as the thesis. Nordic Science Investments closed its first round at €34 million — “we opened the books and we got 34 million for the first closing,” Uimonen said (03:41) — with the book still open a little longer, and a stated ambition to roughly double that. “We have 34 million, which is what we’ve published as our first close… and then the goal would be to maybe double this… around 60 is like where it is, and a 10 plus 2 investment horizon there,” he said, adding that limited partners should expect their commitments to be called in over roughly five years (35:24). Ten years plus a two-year extension is a materially longer clock than a typical SaaS fund, and Uimonen was direct about why: “we are, after all, a normal fund structure, so I have 10 years, so, well, we can’t get involved in nearly all of them” (22:10), even though roughly 1,000 companies a year come through the firm’s deal flow. Deep tech’s path to market is simply longer than software’s, and the fund term has to match the science, not the other way around.

The survival-rate paradox

The single most counterintuitive thing Uimonen said, and the one worth sitting with, inverts the standard venture math. In SaaS, the brutal odds are common knowledge: nine out of ten companies fail, and the fund’s economics depend on the one that doesn’t. Deep tech, he argued, runs the opposite way. “It’s not the well, it’s not the traditional VC model, so so it’s not like if, uh, in SaaS it’s now approximately like 90% die, then, well, in deep tech those percentages are almost the other way around” (23:32). The risk in deep tech isn’t that the underlying breakthrough is worthless — a genuine invention has already cleared a scientific bar that most SaaS ideas never face. The risk instead is timing: in the same breath, Uimonen explained that when a breakthrough invention has genuinely changed the market, the danger is less that it fails outright and more that it simply takes longer to reach the market than expected, with delays along the way. It’s a different risk profile requiring a different kind of patience, which is exactly what the 10+2 structure is built to provide.

That patience shows up in how the fund thinks about winners, too. Rather than needing every portfolio company to have unicorn potential — the assumption baked into most SaaS venture math — Uimonen said a 200 million exit can already be a good outcome for the fund, and for one standout case in the pipeline he described the team modeling a possible 300 million exit. The reference case he pointed to for the model already working is Mobidiag, a University of Helsinki health-technology spinout that was eventually sold at a multiple he put at many times over four times the money back for its investors.

Why early-stage funding is the whole ballgame

This is where the two episodes connect. The short clip is built entirely around one idea: “In the Nordics, there’s often seemed to be a lack of risk appetite among VCs at that early stage — when the team isn’t fully in place yet, the company doesn’t yet own its IP, there’s no revenue of any kind, things like that” (00:00). Uimonen described this as the valley of death for deep tech: researchers with real inventions who don’t yet know how to become entrepreneurs, and no professional capital willing to meet them where they are. Traditional VCs, in his account, would rather wait until the team is assembled, the IP is owned outright, and revenue exists — at which point the company is investable by normal standards but has already lost time, and sometimes lost the best possible CEO, since a candidate with only six months of runway to work with is unlikely to uproot a family and a job to move to Finland. A small angel round raised too early, without a professional early investor attached, often isn’t enough to carry a company to the point where it becomes investable at all. Being first in — and bringing credibility to the hunt for a CEO — is, in his telling, most of the value a deep-tech fund adds before a company has even spun out of the university.

The Nordic capital gap

Uimonen’s diagnosis of the gap is structural, not just anecdotal. Finland ranks, in his words, as the world’s 14th most research-investing country per GDP, yet the commercial results don’t reflect that research intensity — a mismatch he traced back to a shortage of early-risk capital willing to engage before a company exists in any conventional sense. He contrasted this with Sweden, saying the Swedes are much better at this simply because they have commercial money everywhere, which is what gets jobs, subcontracting, networks and sales rolling once the science clears the university gate. He also pointed to two policy tailwinds that could help close the gap — the parliamentary R&D investment project targeting roughly 4% of GDP split across public funding, universities, and companies, and the NATO-linked defense spending track, split between 3.5% core defense spend and half a percent for related dual-use work, which he sees as relevant to deep-tech themes like Nextinox’s steel even though the fund has no direct defense holdings yet. What’s still missing, in his view, is a dedicated private equity, family office, or capital-ownership cluster specialized in deep tech — the kind of pool of committed, patient capital that would let more funds like his exist behind the university, at the pre-seed stage, before anyone else is willing to show up.

Where I land

I’ll say plainly what I said on air: I haven’t put money into this fund yet, though I hope, if I do, to get three times my money back — a modest target next to the ten-times-plus outcomes Uimonen is underwriting for the winners in his portfolio. And I said the other thing too, because it needed saying: making money is harder than people think, and that’s a word of caution from an investment banker’s mouth even as I think funds like this are good to have. I’ll believe the hundred-million-euro exits when I see them; that’s not cynicism about the science, it’s the ordinary discipline of watching a lot of early-stage stories promise more than markets ultimately pay. What I do believe, from my own seat in corporate finance, is the pattern I pointed out to Uimonen myself: on the software side, it’s verticalized, narrow plays within a specific industry that command the higher price, while horizontal products are more exposed to disruption — and Finland’s long-standing strength in business-to-business, rather than consumer products, is the sensible place to keep building from. Deep tech, done through patient, structurally-matched capital at the pre-seed stage, looks to me like the right way to finally convert this country’s genuinely high research intensity into value that stays here.

Source episodes

Every claim in this essay is grounded in the following episodes; quotes carry timestamps linking to the original video. English subtitles and full transcripts are on each episode page.

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