Investment Criteria
Sandwater supports entrepreneurs who are building fantastic companies that will help solve global challenges. We are inspired by the wealth of ideas and the tremendous enthusiasm that we see every day when meeting with these teams. To prioritize the opportunities, we have established a set of criteria for a successfully collaboration between Sandwater and you. Here’s what we are looking for:
Key requirements that we will always consider in our first meeting:
A great team and set-up: The people in the company are of course most essential, but we also assess the overall structure and potential for scaling, and the ecosystem that supports the company
Doing good: We only invest in companies that make a positive impact - something that matters
Potential for outstanding financial returns We are looking for companies that can scale really well, and can turn the investment into great financial returns for our investors
Sandwater can make a contribution: We want to contribute with more than just capital, and believe in close collaboration to get there
Overall requirements:
Company maturity: We look for companies that are close to or have commercial traction with solutions and are ready to scale up. We rarely would make the early seed funding in a company, and we do not invest in companies at the IPO stage or later.
Ticket size: The average size of our first-time investment is about 25MNOK (2,5MEUR). We rarely make a first-time investment below 10MNOK (1MEUR) or above 40MNOK (4MEUR).
Investment capacity: We like supporting our successful initial investments with follow-on investments and we can invest a total of up to 100MNOK (10MEUR) in each company. Furthermore, together with our fund LPs and extensive co-investment ecosystem, we can often facilitate investments significantly beyond our own capacity.
Geographical scope: We We can make investments all over the world, but more often find it easy to support companies that are geographically closer to where we operate (the Nordics). We have, however, made investments across Europe and North America already.
Thematic focus:
We have grouped our investment objectives into three themes and indicate for each of these themes which industries we find within these themes. Within each of these themes there are some industries that we most often see making a good fit and these are areas where we proactively look for investment opportunities. Other industries may not always match our themes quite as much, but we will occasionally make investments there as well:
Investment themes with impact that matters
Exclusions
As a Category 8 fund under the EU regulation we also need to maintain an exclusion list ie investments we categorically cannot make. Such exclusions are based either on the particular industries the companies operate under or on their mode of operations. For impact-oriented companies these exclusions are fortunately rarely a constraining factor, but we nevertheless find it beneficial to list our exclusion criteria here.
Think we could be great partners together in changing the world for the better? Tell us a little about you and your company!
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