Transition

Transition

Transition launched in 2019 with David Helgason, who built game-engine giant Unity Technologies from a Copenhagen apartment into a public company, as its anchor. He structured the firm alongside his brother Ari Helgason as a generalist early-stage venture fund based in London. The thesis is straightforward: founders who have scaled a category-defining company have asymmetric insight into what the next generation of European startups needs to go global. The firm writes first checks from pre-seed through seed, typically ranging from $500,000 to $2 million, and reserves follow-on capital to support portfolio companies into later rounds. The mandate is opportunistic across sectors, reflecting Helgason's own broad technical interests. Publicly disclosed portfolio companies include climate-insights platform CarbonCloud, digital health startup Peppy Health, and collaborative design tool Modulz. Geographically, the firm invests primarily across Europe, with particular activity in the Nordics and the United Kingdom. Transition operates as a lean partnership built around the Helgason brothers. While the firm does not publicly disclose total committed capital or team size, it raised its second fund in 2022. The vehicle draws limited partners who are themselves experienced technology operators, reinforcing a network-driven sourcing model. No affiliated philanthropic foundation or separate real-asset arm is publicly associated with the firm. May 2022: Transition announced the close of its second fund to continue investing in early-stage European technology companies (per Sifted, May 2022). The structural differentiator is the founder-operating pedigree at the center of the firm. David Helgason spent more than a decade scaling Unity to a platform used by millions of developers before its 2020 IPO. Transition funnels that lived experience into a concentrated early-stage portfolio, offering portfolio companies direct access to a founder who navigated technical product-market fit, developer ecosystem dynamics, and eventual public-market scrutiny. That operational depth, paired with a generalist sector scope, distinguishes the firm from many European seed funds that are either sector-specialist or managed by career investors without an equivalent company-building track record.