Startups are the organisations that are the most in need of finance. They almost literally spend all waking hours figuring out how to acquire the financial means to realize their wonderful ideas. However, the funding system as well as the venture capital area are both quite rough on them.

Niloufar Gharavi is a startup’er herself. But she also had a good idea a couple of years ago: why not try to establish an ecosystem where startups are in the same community as the organisations that they need to collaborate with to realize their ideas – companies, research, governments and so on?

She founded the Euro Nordic Funding Alliance, put her hand in fire and scrabbed together enough money to do a kick off meeting last year inviting exactly that – startups, companies, venture capitalist and funding scheme administrators – to build a project facilitating community where the raising of capital is on the full solution/project and not just the individual startup. Making everything stronger and making the startups less vulnerable.

Naturally, I had to bring Niloufar into the virtual podcast studio to share how on earth she did this out of thin air and how it works in all practicality. This is great stuff!

Time codes:

00:02:06 Introduction

00:04:08 Fly in on Euro Nordic Funding Alliance

00:08:23 Understanding Euro Nordic Funding Alliance

00:28:36 How ENFA works with funding

00:59:49 Venture capital and funding

01:17:51 Practical examples

01:20:44 Future perspectives

01:25:58 The toughest challenge