Creandum closes $750m eighth fund, its largest, and steps up its push into the US

The Stockholm firm behind Spotify, Klarna and Lovable will keep half the money in reserve for existing companies and has tripled its investment team in San Francisco.

Creandum, the Stockholm-founded venture firm that was among the first institutional backers of Spotify, has closed Creandum VIII at €668 million ($750 million), the largest fund in its 23-year history. The vehicle is roughly a third bigger than the €500 million Fund VII that closed in June 2024.

The fund will invest in founders at seed and Series A, with half of the capital reserved for new investments and the other half for follow-on rounds in the existing portfolio. Dealroom reports that the firm expects to make about 30 new investments over the next two years. That is fewer than the 35 to 40 deals Fund VII was set up to make, which means larger average cheques at a time when early rounds for AI companies have grown sharply.

The close stands out in a thin market for European fund managers. According to Dealroom, venture funds in Europe raised $14.9 billion across 111 vehicles through September, which makes Fund VIII alone about 5% of the year’s total.

Creandum said the money came from a group of US and European institutions it did not name. Bloomberg, citing partner Fredrik Cassel, reported that around 30 institutions committed capital. Dealroom describes the investor base as university endowments, pension funds and charitable foundations. American money was already central to the previous fund: when Fund VII closed, Creandum said more than half of its capital came from US investors, including five of the eight largest US university endowments.

The second part of the announcement concerns geography. Creandum has had a presence in San Francisco since 2012 and has now opened a new office in the city, at 58 South Park Street. It says it has tripled its investment team there and begun building a platform team to support portfolio companies. The San Francisco staff will work alongside colleagues in Stockholm, London and Berlin.

The firm frames the move as a response to competition. Creandum noted that capital flows between US and European technology remain largely one-way: roughly half of all money invested in European tech over the past year came from the United States, while little European capital went the other way. It said it was expanding its work in San Francisco as US venture firms increasingly compete for deals in Europe. Carl Fritjofsson, a general partner who has been based in San Francisco since 2016, has previously argued that a US presence strengthens the firm’s offer to European founders.

Staffan Helgesson, who founded Creandum in 2003, described the strategy as unchanged at its core. “With Fund VIII, we remain focused on one simple thing,” he said, describing the aim as finding ambitious early-stage founders in Europe, and increasingly in the US, and backing them first.

Creandum’s reputation rests on a small number of very large outcomes. Its second fund made it the first venture investor in Spotify and iZettle, and the firm now counts more than 200 companies in its portfolio, including Klarna, Bolt, Trade Republic, Modal, Rillet and Fuse Energy. It says one in six of its early-stage investments has reached a valuation of at least $1 billion.

The newer portfolio leans heavily on AI. Creandum backs infrastructure companies such as Olix and Modal, the image-generation developer Black Forest Labs and Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding start-up that has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. Cassel told Bloomberg he regarded the firm’s AI exposure as a net positive. Nicolas Kopp, chief executive of the accounting software company Rillet, said Creandum invested when his company was a small team emerging from stealth.

The larger fund also raises the bar for returns. Bigger vehicles need bigger exits to produce the multiples that institutional investors expect, and Creandum will be deploying into a market where valuations for leading AI companies have risen quickly and US firms with deeper pockets are chasing the same European deals. With around 30 new positions planned over two years, the firm’s first cheques from Fund VIII are likely to be written well before it can show how the AI-heavy companies in its current portfolio perform at exit.