Sources to find VCs from

Are you having trouble and running out of ideas on where to find investors to pitch your company to?

In more than one ways the VCs have adapted a policy where they are "hiding" a bit; it is not easy to find out about the deals they have done, and there's no super-clear communication about their exact focus. I have talked about this quite a bit lately and one person commented that: "there isn't anybody working in VC firms that would know anything about marketing".

Here's a couple of tips on where to look for investor & VC names and contact info:

1. http://www.fvca.fi/?pageid=12&parent0=3

The Finnish Venture Capital association. Does not include all the local VCs here in Finland, but many of them are there. A word of advice: many of them are "later stage" so they are very unlikely to invest into companies that are "pre-product" or "pre-revenue".

2. http://www.thefunded.com/

The Funded is a brilliant website that lets founders/entrepreneurs rank and rate VCs and give public feedback on their usefulness, competence etc. The site also lists hundreds of them by investment focus, geography etc.

3. http://www.scandinavianinvestmentnetwork.com/investor

This is a business angel network, supposedly scandinavian wide. Don't know them my self, somebody referred them to me.

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_venture_capital_firms

Wikipedia also lists the most well known and largest VC firms.

5. http://www.nvca.org/members.html

This is the Venture Capital association of the USA. There's a rather massive list of VCs here.

..Than then for something completely different:

6. http://www.isb.edu/WCED/VentureCapitalists.Shtml

Investors with an Indian / non-european base and perhaps focus as well.

It is quite likely that your company is "pre-product" and "pre-revenue", unfortunately this puts you out of the radar screen for almost every VC in the world. Only a tiny minority of them will ever finance pre-seed/seed cases, and in Finland the situation isn't that much rosier.

Who does finance the pre-seed/seed -phase then? You can try talking to these:

i. http://www.lagooncapital.fi/

ii. http://www.veraventure.fi/index.asp?language=2

iii. http://www.brv.com/

iv. http://www.inventure.fi/etusivu.asp

v. http://www.conor.vc/

vi. http://www.nordic.com/

vii. http://www.eng.firstround.fi/

There might be others but those I know either for a fact or through a reliable source have actually invested in pre-seed/seed companies, however for some of them doing just that is pretty rare still.

If you are in the graphics, video, advertising, broadcasting, Web -space, then there's also: http://www.lots.fi/ they are not investors as such, but have a lot of competence and potential to help you out.

And then there's always http://www.tekes.fi/eng/

Who did I miss? Any insights you would want to share on this?