Norway's Venture Engine: Inside Investinor's Strategy with Johan Bøe Bjørkevoll

Norway has long been considered Europe’s energy powerhouse. Now, the country is doubling down on efforts to elevate its technology ecosystem - and Investinor is playing a major role in this transformation. 

Owned and funded by the Norwegian government, Investinor finances everything from seed stage startups to early-stage venture capital funds. It can directly invest in companies, and also match investments alongside private investors. 

“In a developing ecosystem, you cannot take the approach wherein we only invest in the top quartile,” Johan Bøe Bjørkevoll, investment director, told European Women in VC in an interview. “In a young or still-developing market, you don’t have managers sitting on their fourth or fifth fund with a decade of proven returns behind them - that track record simply hasn’t had time to exist yet. If you insist on waiting for it, you end up investing nowhere, and the ecosystem never gets the capital it needs to mature. Our role is to back credible first- and second-time teams early, help them build that track record, and grow the market around them rather than wait for it to arrive fully formed,” he added. Investinor’s ticket sizes average around the €2 to €3 million mark, deployed through three-year synthetic vintage funds built to allocate that capital broadly rather than concentrate it. The strategy is deliberately sector agnostic, with no industry carve-outs or preferences guiding where the capital goes. Within each three-year vintage, Investinor allocates its commitments across around 20 different funds, each typically backing somewhere between 20 and 25 portfolio companies, and deliberately steers away from managers whose portfolios would overlap too heavily with one another. Buyout funds fall outside the mandate entirely - the focus stays on early-stage and venture capital. That construction means each vintage ends up giving Investinor indirect exposure to well over 500 underlying companies once fully deployed.

Bjørkevoll noted that “our first vintage (2020) is doing really well with TVPI of 1,48, net IRR of 13,6% and DPI of 0,14”. “We have many funds well underway out of the J-curve, a handful with TVPI above 2 and even one fund with DPI above 1.” That dispersion across the portfolio is by design, he added, not a sign of anything gone wrong. “Power law is a feature we harness, not a bug we try to avoid. A handful of funds will end up driving most of the returns, and we build the portfolio expecting exactly that, rather than trying to flatten it out.” Right now, he noted, it’s a dozen or so companies out of the roughly 600 in the portfolio that are generating the bulk of the returns.

Growing the national market

In 2026, Norwegian startups have raked in $369 million in VC funding - and are on track to surpass the $652 million raised in 2025, according to Dealroom data. The combined enterprise value of Norwegian startups is around $98.8 billion - and the figure has gained momentum every year, per Dealroom. 

Bjørkevoll acknowledges that Norway is a small nation that needs to play to its strengths. “We’re not used to having the IKEAs and H&Ms,” he said - unlike Sweden, Norway has never really built a large consumer-facing, B2C market of its own. Historically, that meant Norwegian startups grew out of solving problems for the domestic industries around them, rather than chasing global consumers. “Most of our technology companies build for other industries rather than for consumers. A sensor or a piece of software usually has a very specific buyer in mind, and that buyer tends to be whoever the founders themselves used to work for - often the energy sector or the fisheries industry,” he said. That is starting to shift, he added, as a new generation of early-stage companies increasingly builds for larger, global markets rather than solving purely local, industry-specific needs.

Norway is also one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil and gas, but the new generation of tech talent isn’t being lured by these industries - despite the attractive salaries on offer. 

A key part of the flywheel, he noted, is that serial founders don’t just start new companies - many of them go on to become fund managers themselves, recycling their experience and networks back into the ecosystem. “The flywheel isn’t only about spinning out new startups; it’s also spinning out new fund managers,” he said. Startup Lab, Oslo’s biggest startup incubator, is one clear example: several of today’s Nordic fund managers have roots there.

Bjørkevoll also highlighted how the country can strengthen its venture ecosystem through a mix of policy and financing measures. “On tax, we should be aiming to be on par with the rest of the Nordics, particularly around how unrealised gains on private company shares are treated,” he said. 

“There’s a large pool of untapped potential in European pension capital that has barely touched venture so far,” he added. “Schemes like France’s Tibi initiative and the UK’s Mansion House Accord show what’s possible once institutional capital starts moving into the asset class. Our job now is to build Norwegian and Nordic fund managers strong and credible enough to actively compete for that capital.” 

Johan Bøe Bjørkevoll is an Investment Director at Investinor. He joined in 2020 after 15 years of fund investments at Innovation Norway and has previously worked for DNB Asset Management; he also holds an MBA from the University of Bath. 

Investinor is an investment company owned by the Norwegian government. It invests risk capital into early-stage startups and venture funds in Norway.