Specialist VC

Founding partners Gerri Kodres and Riivo Anton lead deal sourcing, analysis, and portfolio management. Kaspar Hanni, a partner and former Angel of the Year awardee, handles deal structuring and monitoring. All three sit on the investment committee, supported by two investment managers who cover pipeline origination and post-investment support.

The firm's LP base functions as a de facto sourcing network. Limited partners are founders and early employees of fast-growth Baltic and Nordic tech companies, including Wise, Bolt, Vinted, Slack, and Pipedrive. They refer founders, signal market shifts, and occasionally co-invest, giving Specialist VC early visibility on talent and company formation in the region.

It operates as both. The partnership began as an angel syndicate in 2013 and has since raised two formal venture funds. Direct investments flow through the fund structures, while the syndicate track record continues to influence deal access and reputation among Baltic founders.

The firm makes direct equity investments in startups. Its LP base is composed of individuals—typically operators—rather than institutional fund-of-funds, so Specialist VC itself does not allocate to third-party venture funds.

Pre-seed through Series A is the primary window, with initial check sizes starting around €250,000 and reaching up to €3 million in follow-on rounds. The firm also maintains a secondaries practice for Series A and later-stage positions, typically acquiring stakes from early shareholders or secondary market sellers.

The firm does not publish a formal exclusion list, but its stated focus on B2B, SaaS, fintech, platforms, software-enabled hardware, and deep tech suggests it rarely participates in consumer internet, direct-to-consumer physical goods, or capital-intensive industrials outside of hardware-enabled software plays.

The LP base consists of founders and early employees from regional tech success stories such as Veriff, Wise, Bolt, Slack, Pipedrive, F-Secure, Kilo.Health, and Vinted. This operator-led model means the firm's capital is heavily concentrated among individuals who built and scaled tech companies in the same geography.