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EQT Ventures
EQT Ventures deploys over €2.3B in European and US tech via its AI-driven platform Motherbrain, led by Hjalmar Winbladh and Lars Jörnow.
EQT Ventures
EQT Ventures launched in May 2016 with €566 million for its debut fund, backed by the EQT AB group—a listed Stockholm-based buyout firm that had spent two decades buying industrial and healthcare companies before betting that its operational playbook could transfer to early-stage technology. The founding team mixed consumer-internet and mobility operators: Winbladh co-founded Wrapp and Rebtel, Jörnow co-founded King Digital, and Koolen was Booking.com's CEO during its scale-up years. That operator DNA shaped the fund's premise from day one. The firm runs a multi-stage strategy spanning seed to growth, with its heaviest check-writing concentrated at Series A and B. Its portfolio stretches from Stockholm to San Francisco, London to Berlin, with known positions including Einride, the electric-autonomous trucking company; Wolt, the Helsinki-founded delivery platform EQT backed before DoorDash acquired it for €7 billion; and Handshake, the US-based talent marketplace. EQT Ventures combines direct equity deals with a strong preference for lead-or-co-lead positions, and it often reserves capital for follow-on rounds rather than running a spray-and-pray seed strategy. Geographically, the team allocates across the Nordics, the UK, Germany, France, Benelux, and increasingly Israel and the US West Coast. The partnership operates six global offices—Stockholm, London, Berlin, Paris, San Francisco, and Tel Aviv—with a team built around sector-focused investment directors rather than generalist partners. In September 2022, the firm closed its third flagship fund at €1.1 billion, bringing total capital raised across three vintages to over €2.3 billion (per the firm, September 2022). That fund included a dedicated €100 million allocation for early-stage climate-tech investments. EQT Ventures also runs separate fund structures: a smaller fund for seed deals and a growth fund targeting later-stage companies adjacent to its core portfolio. The firm is not a single-family office and does not manage third-party wealth on a discretionary basis outside its commingled vehicles. The operational advantage is Motherbrain, a proprietary machine-learning system that scans millions of data points across company registries, app stores, GitHub repositories and news feeds to flag promising startups months before they formally raise. The platform has been in continuous use since 2017, giving the partnership a data-moat that few European VCs can replicate. That tool, combined with EQT's parent-brand access to corporate acquirers and later-stage infrastructure, creates a structural pipeline from seed-stage discovery to eventual exit—either via public markets or through EQT's own private-equity portfolio companies.
General information
Firm type
Asset Manager
Year founded
2016
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
Europe
Country
Sweden
City
Stockholm
Corporate office
Stockholm, Sweden
Additional offices
San Francisco, CA, United States · London, United Kingdom · Berlin, Germany · Paris, France · New York, NY, United States · Tel Aviv, Israel
Principals
Hjalmar Winbladh
Partner
Lars Jörnow
Partner
Kees Koolen
Partner
Ali Mitchell
Partner
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
Who runs investment decisions at 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.
How does EQT Ventures source proprietary deal flow?
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.
Is EQT Ventures structured as a single-family office or a traditional venture firm?
It is a venture capital franchise within the publicly listed EQT AB (Nasdaq Stockholm: EQT). The group is neither a family office nor a multi-family office; it is an institutional asset manager with over €200 billion in total group AUM across private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and venture strategies. EQT Ventures operates its own committed funds and does not manage individual family wealth.
Does EQT Ventures participate in fund commitments or only direct deals?
The firm is predominantly a direct investor. Its primary funds make equity investments in private companies, typically leading or co-leading rounds. It does not operate a fund-of-funds program within the Ventures division, though the broader EQT group does make limited-partner commitments to external managers through separate strategies. The Ventures team occasionally invests alongside EQT's buyout or growth funds when a portfolio company bridges stages.
What investment stages does EQT Ventures target and at what check size?
The main fund concentrates on Series A and Series B rounds, with initial checks typically ranging from €5 million to €50 million, depending on stage and sector. The firm also operates an early-stage fund for seed investments (€1 million to €3 million checks) and a later-stage vehicle for growth rounds. The September 2022 flagship fund included a €100 million carve-out dedicated to early-stage climate-tech companies across Europe and the US.
Which sectors does EQT Ventures explicitly avoid?
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.
How is EQT Ventures related to the wider EQT group?
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.
Profile maintained by Altss using OSINT (open-source intelligence), regulatory filings, licensed data partners, and verified direct submissions. Read the methodology. Last updated: . Continuous refresh with full update cycles at least every 30 days.
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