Youth-led VC in Finland closes €10m fund with bet that a teenager will create the next Supercell
A venture capital firm whose investment team is made up entirely of investors aged 25 or under has closed its third fund at €10 million – five times the size of its previous vehicle. Wave Ventures, based in Helsinki, described the milestone as the transformation of a student-led operation into a professional fund that can compete head-on with older VCs in the Nordic and Baltic early-stage market.
Fund III: from student club to professional pre-seed player
The €10 million close marks a significant scaling for Wave, which was founded in 2016 as a student initiative. Its previous fund stood at €2 million. With Fund III, the firm now writes cheques of up to €300,000 and plans to back 10 to 20 early-stage teams per year across the Nordics and Baltics. Johannes Korpela, the firm’s CEO, said the growth had turned what was once a student-led vehicle into a professional fund that earns respect from older investors by being first in with €100,000 tickets.
Wave’s limited partners include the founders of Supercell, Wolt, Bolt, Slack, Skype, Oura, Nokia, GANNI and Voi, alongside European early-stage venture capital firms and family offices. Follow-on investors in Wave’s portfolio companies include Speedinvest, Cherry Ventures and byFounders. The fund’s backers also include operators from Spotify.
Since launch, Wave has backed more than 50 companies, frequently writing the first institutional cheque. It has invested in nearly 80 per cent of venture-capital-backed Finnish startups led by chief executives under 30. Notable portfolio companies include Inven, which later raised an €11.2 million Series A, and Tzafon, whose pre-seed round was at the time the largest in Swedish history. In 2024, Wave backed three of the five Nordic companies accepted into Y Combinator. Fund III companies The Token Company, Tenet Industries and Librar Labs have since joined the accelerator. Four Wave alumni have been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Rebellion Grant: backing founders before they have an idea
Alongside the fund close, Wave launched a €240,000 grant programme called the Wave Rebellion Grant, which pushes the firm’s approach further than any VC programme in the region has gone before. The initiative targets founders who are pre-idea, pre-revenue and pre-funding. Ten founders across the Nordics will receive grants and partner credits from AWS, Anthropic, Lovable, Modal and Verda. No equity is taken and there are no obligations.
Korpela explained that some of the most exceptional founders do not fit neatly into existing startup programmes, accelerators or university tracks. “Venture capital often relies on pattern matching, but the best founders rarely look obvious before their breakouts,” he said. “The Rebellion Grant is our way of supporting them earlier.”
Fredrik Hjelm, co-founder and chief executive of Voi Technology, said Wave’s track record of finding founders before anyone else does was why he backed the fund. “Wave keeps finding the founders behind them before anyone else does,” he said.
The thesis: backing pre-idea, AI-native founders before anyone else knows their name
Wave’s core argument is that the artificial intelligence era is producing a new kind of builder – younger, faster, thinking in systems rather than features. The firm wants to be the first institutional name on their cap table, before anyone else knows who they are. “They have grown during the AI era. They’re thinking through the system,” Korpela said. “We believe the next Wolt and Supercell will be built by these young individuals. And the Nordics have to double down on this talent now, so we can stop those really potential individuals from going abroad.”
Brain drain is the unstated risk behind the whole thesis. Without an early backer, the most ambitious young Nordic founders head to San Francisco or London, where capital is thicker and networks run deeper. Wave’s answer is proximity: being younger, closer and faster than any competitor. The firm uses a rotating team of top university students embedded in startup ecosystems across Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn, providing real-time access to the communities where the most ambitious Gen Z founders are emerging. Its edge, if it holds, comes from being in rooms where other funds are not – university group chats, hackathons, Slush corridors – before the founders have a deck.
The broader Nordic pre-seed market has seen median round sizes hold steady at €1 million, but the ceiling has shattered and competition to find the best founders first has sharpened. Wave is not the only firm targeting the earliest stage. Lifeline Ventures, which backed Wolt, Aiven and Supercell, writes conviction-first cheques with a similar philosophy and raised the largest Finnish venture capital fund in history at €425 million in 2025. Inception Fund raised €21 million to back AI-first technical founders at the inception stage. ByFounders covers the same New Nordics geography with a larger cheque size. The wider Finnish startup ecosystem raised a record €1.9 billion in 2025, and domestic VC fundraising reached a record €678 million.
Wave’s position is that it sees deals the others do not because it is embedded in the communities where the next wave of founders is still deciding what to build. The deeper question, as Wave’s fund size grows and more capital chases the same earliest-stage founders across the Nordics, is how long the proximity edge holds. Fredrik Hjelm added that Wave’s track record of finding founders before anyone else does was the reason he backed the fund.
