For May, we highlight another funding milestone for one of the leading health and wellness startups in the region, another Nordic acquisition by Apple and a decision that highlights the struggle that many Nordic startups face attracting and retaining talent.

Yesterday, we revealed that in Q1 2017, the Nordics (alongside Germany) recorded the most VC-backed exits in Europe in Q1 2017.

Still, when we look at the last couple of years as a whole, VC-backed exits are seeing barely any growth in the region, especially when you compare against the number of investments that are taking place and especially when you compare this ratio that what’s happening in the U.S.

Technically, Q1 2017 was a down quarter for funding in the Nordics despite being a stronger one than all in 2016 except Q4. This was the start of a stabilisation that we’ve seen play out so far this year in the region.

It was a pretty strong quarter for exits though, although it was a fairly spectacular one for VC-backed exits.

All in all, it was a fairly underwhelming first three months of the year, but how did it stack up compared to the rest of Europe?

The morning started yesterday with news that Unity Technologies, a Danish founded company had raised a further $400 million at a $2.6 billion valuation (1) in addition to the $181 million they raised less than 12 months ago.

The usual celebratory reactions followed, however, if you delved a little further into the details, there was something extremely tangible to be positive about beyond the headline number.

We’ve already seen signs that Nordic startups are beginning to mature and are able to raise further capital, with more $10 million+ rounds than we’ve previously seen at this stage of the year.

Today, we can reveal another promising sign, 58% of the investments that have been made in the region so far this year have been follow-on investments.

Twelve months ago, we produced an article called The Nordic Zeitgeist using Google Trends to look at which of the ‘hottest’ verticals were being searched for to see if we could get a better idea of what the main hubs in the Nordics may be looking at next.

A year on, we thought it would be interesting to see how these verticals have evolved in search term interest over the last 12 months in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to get a sense of how they continue to reach (or don’t) a more mainstream interest in each country.

2017 is closing in on $1 billion raised, with $875 million invested already in Nordic startups so far this year.

At only five months into 2017 this certainly appears healthy, however when you consider that $2.7 billion in total was invested in the whole of 2016, how is this year faring when you compare to how quickly previous years reached the $1 billion mark?

Two years ago we ran an analysis where we discovered that there had been a 50/50 split between new and returning investors in the Nordics in Q1 2015. In the conclusion of that post, we postured that we felt a 70% returning and a 30% new would be healthier and more sustainable for an ecosystem needing to mature, predicting that we’d be there at the end of 2016.

Well, we weren’t too far off, as Q1 2017 saw a 64% returning and 36% new investor split.

After establishing the top 15 funding rounds of 2017 yesterday, today we turn our attentions to the top 10 and how they compare so far to the top 10 rounds in H1 2014, 2015 and 2016 to get a sense of just how large these investments are compared to what’s come around this point in previous years.

While investment levels out in terms of the number of rounds happening, there is still a noticeable increase in the later, larger rounds.

In fact, we’ve seen 20 rounds above $10 million already this year, meaning we are well on course to surpass the 37 we witnessed across the whole of 2016.

Five and a half months into the year, we can now begin to start projecting what this year might look like for investment and begin to better understand the temperature of the Nordic investment scene right now.

What has been clear for a while now is that investment has begun to level out and is not growing at anywhere near the rate we have been seeing in recent years. This is well demonstrated by the fact that at this point of the year, we see just 27 more investments than we did in 2016, 11.54% growth, compared to 182% growth at this point in 2016.

With Bitcoin at a record high price and the rise in prominence of Ethereum, there’s a strong argument to be made for Cryptocurrency currently experiencing a record level of interest, however, despite this, investment into Nordic cryptocurrency startups isn’t increasing, yet.

Next up in our sub-sector investment series is Health and Wellness, a vertical that has become synonymous with the region and one that certainly attracts its fair share of investments.

In this analysis we break down the investments into sub-sectors to get a sense for how investors tastes (and the type of startups) within the health sphere has developed over time.

As we picked up on in our analysis of April’s investments, the trend of little investment activity at the $500,000-$1 million round size is continuing into 2017. In fact, of 120 investments made below $3 million, just 21 of them were within this range.

This doesn’t make it the lowest quarter for investments of this size, but it is certainly close to being so, something that on the surface appears to be surprising, especially as there is so much early-stage capital in the ecosystem right now.

This month we look at one of the leading Nordic energy startups, an exit from one of the region's most renowned entrepreneurs and speculate whether 2017 indeed is the year that Spotify go public, but perhaps not how we expected...