Denmark is the home country of startup success stories like Zendesk, Tradeshift, Podio and many more. Copenhagen, the country’s capital city, ranks on place 9 on our list of Europe’s major startup hubs.
In the beginning of this year, we took a close look at the Danish startup scene and created a list of 5 promising startups to watch in 2016. All of the startups we’re mentioning below entered the market within the last two years and each of these companies has something special to add to the tech and/or business world in 2016.
1. Capdesk: The social shareholder platform Capdesk was founded in 2015 with the goal to make investments in SMEs accessible to all. Capdesk wants to bring unlisted shares (for e.g. the ones of equity crowdfunding) to life by creating a transparent, collaborative and accessible investment environment for companies and investors of all kind. The platform makes the companies’ shares digital and gathers all the investor relation activities in one place. Capdesk is currently running a beta version and has been financially backed by the business angel Nicolaj Højer Nielsen and the Innovation Fund Denmark.
2. Linkfire: Founded in 2014, Linkfire aims to reach all music fans, no matter their music consumption preferences. The Copenhagen-based startup connects artists, albums, tracks and playlists with consumers across multiple devices and numerous access and ownership platforms. This way, Linkfire enables smart marketing for the music industry. As an example: It doesn’t make sense to push out an iTunes link to a Spotify-user. Yet these kind of marketing mistakes are made daily and that’s basically what Linkfire is going to change for its clients. Linkfire so far secured about €2.4 million in venture capital (€ 2.3 million in September of 2015).
3. Startuptravels: Launched in October 2014 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Startuptravels is a new travel platform allowing users to connect with local entrepreneurs and professionals while traveling. A user can find a place to stay, a desk to work at or even just arrange a meet up for coffee. Startuptravels already counts several thausand active users from more than 160 countries. So far, the Danish startup seems to have raised no seed funding.
4. Shipbeat: The simple shipping API built for the ecommerce world. Shipbeat, which started in 2014, is a unified and developer-friendly API for shipping that instantly enables businesses to do shipments online. The Copenhagen-based startup offer multi-carrier management for e-commerce companies via a simple shipping API. Shipbeat enables you to get all your carriers rolled into a single shipping integration. The Shipbeat API has been designed to automate shipping and improve shopping for your customers. In August of 2014, the promising startup secured €1.2 million by Sunstone Capital, Seed Capital and angel investor Klaus Nyengaard.
5. MusicSense: The innovative music streaming app MusicSense, which was founded in 2014, knows your music tastes and curates the best songs for you. MusicSense plans to make music subscriptions affordable for the mainstream. The intelligent algorithm behind the app scans user preferences and builds a personalized playlist. MusicSense’s metadata crawlers scan over 40 000 radios worldwide to provide fresh and accurate content. Music is prioritized based on user location, language and the music’s country of origin. So far, the Copenhagen- and Kazan-based startup secured about €100K of financial backing.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
