We are excited to announce that Wudpecker, a groundbreaking AI-driven knowledge management startup, has successfully raised €330,000 in a pre-seed funding round through an investment touchpoint initiated on the Node by Slush platform. The investment comes from a consortium of investors including Trind VC, Accelerace, and Sofokus Ventures.
Reima Linnanvirta, Partner at Trind.vc, first got Wudpecker on the radar in 2022 through an accelerator: “Back then, it was too early and the focus wasn’t an exact match for us, but we fell in love with the team. In 2023, we stumbled on Wudpecker again, this time through Slush’s Investor Tool that we were testing. We could see from the data that the team had shifted their focus, and the timing was just right for us to jump in”.
Wudpecker’s founding team – Joona, Hai, and Ankur
Reima Linnanvirta is one of 30 investors who has been helping Slush develop a completely new tool for investors to find and connect with early-stage startups on the Slush Platform, 100% online, all year round.
Psssst…! Investors with Slush tickets can test the tool with the data of startups coming to Slush 😉
WHAT IS INVESTOR TOOL?
- Autonomous access for investors to the entire pool of year-round startups on Node by Slush community.
- Search, filter, contact, and keep up-to-date on the most promising early-stage startups coming from Europe.
With now 1.5k startups on Slush’s year-round Node by Slush platform, we are able to scale the investor–founder touchpoints way beyond what we’ve done so far with the monthly online community events.
Slush is on a mission to help and create founders to change the world. To support founders year-round: we are building a tool for investors to find startups and keep up-to-date with their favourite ones.
- Investor Tool presents startup data in a table format. All relevant company information from pitch decks to financials is visible at a glance.
Advanced filters help you search, filter & sort startups based on 30+ data points.
Saved views – once you have created a unique list of companies through filtering, you can save the filtered view and get notified of new startups relevant to you.
Startup signals – once you subscribe to a company, you’ll get notifications whenever they update their company information.
Exporting data – you can export the data from the platform, whether unfiltered or filtered.
We started building the Investor Tool only this year, and we are still iterating it with a handful of investors. Based on feedback, we’ve been able to make some progress, and we are looking for new investors to try it out!
BEYOND INVESTOR TOOL – YEAR-ROUND CONCEPTS FOR INVESTORS ON NODE
Matchmaking Sprint
Every month we facilitate a more active form of first touch point with VCs and founders – Matchmaking Sprint with startups. It is an opportunity for startups to pitch their company to investors in virtual 15-minute 1-on-1 meeting slots. Startups actively looking for funding apply to meet investors, investors select who they want to meet, and we’ll take care of the rest: schedules and calendar invites.
Investor Office Hours
It is a group setting for investors to meet with startups curated based on each fund’s investment thesis. It can show founders a glimpse of how it would be to work with you and get a pulse of what our community of founders are going through at the moment. The content of these sessions is hands-on advice for founders.
WHAT TYPE OF INVESTORS IS NODE FOR?
We built the product for investors who make direct investments in startups – mainly VCs. The sessions and meetings are participated by early-stage investors focusing on the Nordics and Europe.
Investors get access to a pool of the most promising early-stage startups from Europe. All the startup profiles are 100% filled by the founders and operators themselves. The founders in our community are fully in control of their narrative and company updates – straight from the source.