Crowberry Capital Research
Investment Thesis
Crowberry Capital is a Nordic seed and early-stage venture fund founded in 2017 by three women, Hekla Arnardóttir, Helga Valfells, and Jenny Ruth Hrafnsdottir, who had worked together for over seven years prior to founding the firm. Crowberry describes its mission as backing "fearless visionaries" and building "companies that are good for people," and frames its decision-making around a single guiding question: "what is best for this portfolio company?" The firm is notable in the European venture landscape as an all-female founding team that has raised the largest VC fund ever based in Iceland.
Sector Focus
Crowberry invests across a deliberately broad set of technology sectors rather than a single vertical:
- Gaming & entertainment
- B2B SaaS & analytics
- FinTech & digital currency
- HealthTech
- AI & machine learning
- Climate / energy tech
- VR/AR
This breadth reflects the firm's Nordic-market focus (Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland) more than a specific technical thesis: they aim to back the best early teams coming out of the region across whichever category they occupy.
Stage Focus
Crowberry focuses almost exclusively on seed and early-stage startups. Track record data shows the bulk of its roughly 30 investments are seed rounds (average round size ~$2.5M), with a smaller number of Series A follow-ons (average round size ~$7M) into existing portfolio companies.
Check Size
Published check size on their site is €200,000 to €2,000,000 per initial investment, consistent with a seed-focused strategy that reserves capital for follow-on participation in stronger performers' Series A rounds.
Recent Activity
Crowberry raised its first fund ($40M) in 2017 and its second fund, Crowberry II, launched in 2021 at €76M and reached a final close of €90M in 2023, backed by the European Investment Fund (a €20M anchor commitment), Icelandic pension funds, family offices, and angel investors including Unity Technologies founder David Helgason. Fund II is the largest VC fund ever raised out of Iceland. Recent disclosed activity includes a follow-on participation in Quanscient's €10M Series A (May 2026, alongside 55 North, B&C Group, Maki.vc, QAI Ventures, and First Fellow Partners) and participation in Hemi Health's €4M seed round (February 2026, led by EIFO and SwissHealth Ventures). Both are existing-portfolio follow-ons rather than new leads, consistent with an actively-deploying but reserve-disciplined fund.
Portfolio Highlights
Crowberry's portfolio spans 25+ Nordic companies including Sling, Avo, Dreamdata, Monerium, KARDS, Aldin (Aldin Dynamics), Prescriby, Tiimo, Embla, Saidot, Snerpa Power, Hemi Health, Lucinity, Katla, and Quanscient. Its most notable exit to date is Garden (Garden.io), a Berlin-based open-source CI/DevOps acceleration platform that Crowberry backed in a 2022 Series A alongside Sorenson Capital and 468 Capital; Garden was acquired by Incredibuild in November 2024.
Team
- Hekla Arnardóttir — Founding Partner; background in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (University of Iceland)
- Helga Valfells — Founding Partner; educated at Harvard University
- Jenny Ruth Hrafnsdottir — Founding Partner; background in MEMS Engineering (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
- Stella Stoyanova — Head of Data & Modeling
- Inga Eiríksdóttir — Platform Manager
- Hrafnkell Ásgeirsson — General Counsel
- Svana Ingólfsdóttir — Venture Partner
- Kári Tristan Helgason — Venture Partner
- Tim McCarthy — Venture Partner
- Jóhann Pétur Harðarson — Venture Advisor
The three founding partners collectively have supported over 50 technology startups and negotiated 15+ exits across their careers prior to and during Crowberry.
Decision Process
As a small partnership of three founding partners plus venture partners and a dedicated platform/data team, Crowberry operates as a partnership-style decision process rather than a solo-GP or large investment-committee structure.
Founder Preferences
Crowberry emphasizes backing founding teams building "companies that are good for people" and has an explicit track record of supporting female-led teams: roughly a third of Crowberry I's portfolio had female CEOs, well above global VC averages for female-founder funding.
Geographic Focus
Crowberry is headquartered in Reykjavík with additional presence in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and invests across the broader Nordic region: Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.