- OpenOcean raised $111.5 million in its third core investment fund.
- The European VC invests in Big Data and Deep Tech startups.
- OpenOcean named Ekaterina Almasque as its general partner.
OpenOcean is a European VC investing in Big Data and Deep Tech start-ups. It has hit a target of $ 111.5 million for its third core investment fund. It is targeting a final close of EUR 130 million by mid-year this year. The European Investment Fund (EIF), Tesi, pension funds, big family offices, and Corpus Christi College of Oxford University are among the LPs in the new fund.
Ekaterina Almasque has already led investments in IQM (superconducting quantum machines) and Sunlight.io (multi-cloud hyper-converged infrastructure). She also led the London team and operations for the venture. Almasque was Managing Director of the Samsung Catalyst Fund in Europe before joining. She led investments in the Artificial Intelligence Processor of Graphcore, the rapid mapping layer of Mapillary, and the autonomous driving stack of AIMotive.
The fund announced that it will invest primarily at the Series A stage. An initial investment of between EUR 3 million and EUR 5 million across the key areas of artificial intelligence, application-driven data infrastructure, smart automation, and open source for OpenOcean.
OpenOcean’s Team Members
The OpenOcean team includes Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, MariaDB’s spiritual lord. Also, one of MySQL’s original developers, MariaDB’s predecessor; Tom Henriksson, who invested in MySQL and MariaDB; and Ralf Wahlsten and Patrik Backman. OpenOcean General Partner Tom Henriksson commented: “Ekaterina brings the team a huge amount of expertise and exemplifies the way we want our founders to be supported.” For OpenOcean, Fund 2020 is a significant move, with prestigious LPs trusting our approach and experience and believing in our ability to find the best in Europe for data solutions and infrastructure technologies.
The next five years will be crucial for digital infrastructure. The breakthrough technologies limit the stack’s capabilities. Enabling this next stage of progress in infrastructure is vital to the realization of economic-wide digitization initiatives. It will decide what the internet of the future looks like. We are excited about the success of the world’s leading companies being developed across Europe. We look forward to supporting the next generation of tech leaders, said Almasque.
It’s very unusual to see such a VC so deep in the stack that it also invested in one of Europe’s first unicorns and created the worldwide open source ecosystem. So this was certainly an interesting team for me to join. And among pioneering ecosystems, such as big data analytics, what OpenOcean has been doing since its inception in 2011 has been very special and it remains very pioneering, pushing the frontiers of artificial intelligence, and now quantum computing.