Why start-ups work with us

Nordic Fintech Angels is a Value Accelerator that invests both money and expertise. The team comprises highly experienced senior leaders and entrepreneurs who have built highly successful companies.

Nordic Fintech Angels works with founders to create value and rapidly achieve their company’s mission and key milestones. The team is deeply invested and engages hands-on with startups strategically and operationally.

At Nordic Fintech Angels, the team takes a holistic approach that draws upon the collective experience of its tenured team in all three tenets of a good business: people, product, and go-to-market. The team is made up of individuals that have a passion for helping start-up’s succeed, have a strong network in the investor community and have the senior experience you need, especially during the early days of a startup. With Nordic Fintech Angels, you can be sure that you’re getting the best of the best to help you build towards a trajectory of scale.

As a team of founders and senior leaders, Nordic Fintech Angels deeply understands the challenges that founders face at every stage. The team believes that all companies are evaluated on four things - people, product, processes and technology. However, many startups with funding still lack the network, talent, and access to drive those things at the fastest rate.

How do we evaluate companies?

You need to consider who you want to join you, on your journey. Similar do we as investors and advisors need to consider what companies we believe in and where our support can make significant impact.
Below we are outlining how we structure our thinking when screening companies.

  • We focus and prioritize start-up companies within Fintech and SaaS. This is where we have extensive experience and competencies that can be put into play and support the founder team.

  • We are investing in and supporting early stage start-up. Typically just before the first external funding round.
    We are based in Copenhagen and are mainly looking for start-ups in the danish and nordic community.

  • Our engagement is based on our investment in the company, investment from our network of angel and venture investors. And a sweat equity element related to the advisory and close cooperation between the company and selected NFTA senior partners.

Introducing our 3PT framework

The purpose of our framework is to structure and clarify our thinking about your company and the opportunity it represents. It is not a checklist where you need to tick off every box, however, we encourage you to consider how you can best address the relevant areas in our screening framework.

PRODUCT:

  • Clear Customer Need: Is the company addressing a clear customer pain points?

  • Strong Solution: Is it a solutions that effectively alleviate customer pain and provide competitive advantages?

  • Sufficient Value & Quantifiable: How well is the pricing models, market size validated and understood.

  • Scalability: How well is this business idea scaling and how strong are the barrieres for scaling?

TECHNOLOGY:

  • Uniqueness: We look at the disruptive potential, ease of copying, and reliance on existing tech stacks.

  • Intellectual Property Rights: Consider ownership and patent status.

  • Competition: Understand alternatives, competitors, and potential partners.

  • Legal and Regulatory Risk: Demonstrate compliance understanding and risk mitigation.

  • Data is gold: Is the company building uniq insights or data points that becomes part of the business model or create barriers for compititors?

PEOPLE - The Founder Team:

  • Founder team: An outstanding founder team is the core of creating a successful company. We invest in the early stage of the company, and it is essential for us to understand why you are the right group of people, in the right place, working on the right thing.

  • Track Record: We evaluate the teams experience (ex. entrepreneurship, industry experience) and network.

  • Team: Assess the team composition (sales, tech, finance) and structure.

  • Ownership: Understand ownership structure, flexibility, and commitment.

  • Location: We invest in Nordic teams

PROCESS:

  • Company Stage: Is the company at the early stage where it is relevant to combine our advisory and investment. It is typically at the first funding round of 2 - 4 mDKK. Is there a proof of concept, a commercialization plan ect.

  • Funding: We evaluate burn rate, time-to-liquidation, willingness to bootstrap, future funding needs and current investor (friends and family) support.

  • Transparent: We look to understand the difficult parts of your business or product: this is where we can help you. If everything is perfect, you don’t need us. But we know from experience that’s rarely the case.

  • Target Market: What is the scale of the problem you’re adressing? What is the size of your commercial opportunity? In what geography, segment (B2B vs. B2C)?

  • Sales: Are you already in the market with the first version of your product? Then we look to undderstand your marketing approach, collateral, actual sales, validation, pipeline, pricing, customer journey, and referral models.

  • Business Model: Is your business model scalable, what are the challenges in the model?

How do we work with start-ups

Screening

In order to ensure there is a good match between start-up and NFTA, we initially invite to a 4-meeting setup. The agendas are briefly described below: 

Get the Idea:
This is where we hear your pitch and evaluate if you have a strong product/solution, a great team, where you are in your company development process and finally what technology you have chosen to leverage.

Business model engineering

Deep Dive:
Focus is on your Value Proposition and evaluating if there is a match between start-up and NFTA and a willingness to adjust and take in advice

Initial Funding

Critical to Succeed:
Here we jointly evaluate budget and plans, resources, test with potential customers and investors, work on your investor pitch and determine company valuation. After this stage we will share our proposal for collaboration

Formalizing Partnership:
At NFTA we strongly believe that in early stage funding, chemistry between founders and NFTA is key. Therefore we define a list of mutual deliverables and a timeline. This is formalized in a contract with an exit option before any funding and shares are traded.

How we work with start-ups

Scale

Board:
At NFTA we deliver very hands-on operational sparring and offer to form a board 

GTM:
Sparring on commercial strategy, customer messaging, sales channels, partnerships and sales model

Competencies:
Support in getting key resources onboard and in some cases take an active, interim role

Capitalization

Rounds:
Going from angels investment, to seed funding to VC is a process where we support with company valuation templates, dilution simulation, legal documents for shareholder agreements etc. 

Network:
NFTA will also leverage our network in the funding “food chain” and identify and introduce the right investors and participate actively in investor meetings and negotiations