EQT Ventures

The core investing partnership is led by Hjalmar Winbladh, Lars Jörnow, Kees Koolen, and Ali Mitchell. Each partner operates with sector-specific mandates and geographic coverage—Winbladh on enterprise and frontier tech, Jörnow on consumer and marketplaces, Koolen on mobility and climate, Mitchell on deep tech and UK/Israel. Investment committee decisions are made by the partnership as a group, and the firm stresses a consensus-driven approach rather than a single-IC-gatekeeper model.

The firm built Motherbrain, a machine-learning engine that ingests public and proprietary datasets—company registries, app-store rankings, GitHub activity, news sentiment—to surface companies before they begin formal fundraising. Motherbrain has been operating since 2017 and flagged companies like Handshake and Einride well ahead of their Series A processes. This is supplemented by the GP network; Kees Koolen's Booking.com and Uber ties, for example, have historically surfaced mobility deals that other European VCs did not see.

The firm has publicly stated it does not invest in biotech or traditional pharmaceutical development, semiconductor hardware, or defense/weapons technology. While EQT Ventures has a climate-tech allocation, it also avoids capital-intensive deep-science startups that require laboratory infrastructure—the team prefers digital-business models even within climate. It has not made a direct investment in crypto-native protocols or tokens, focusing instead on enterprise blockchain applications.

EQT Ventures is a wholly owned strategy of EQT AB, the publicly listed Stockholm-based investment group founded by Investor AB and the Wallenberg family in 1994. The Ventures team operates with its own investment committee, partnership structure, and fund vehicles, but it draws on EQT's centralized support functions: legal, compliance, fundraising, and the network of 600+ industrial advisors. EQT Group's private-equity portfolio companies also serve as potential customers, acquirers, and distribution channels for Ventures portfolio companies, creating a structural advantage over standalone VCs.