- Norrsken Evolve has opened a permanent Amsterdam base at Norrsken House Amsterdam, formalising its presence in the Netherlands with approximately €3M earmarked for 5 to 8 Dutch investments of up to €500,000 each.
- The move directly addresses what Techleap’s State of Dutch Tech 2026 report, produced in collaboration with TNO and Invest-NL, identifies as the Netherlands’ most critical structural challenge: a persistent pre-seed and seed funding gap that institutional capital consistently skips.
- The fund closed at €62M after oversubscribing its initial €40M target, backed by the European Investment Fund, Saminvest, SmartCap, and the investment vehicle of Wise and Skype co-founders Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi.
When Alex Bakir, General Partner at Norrsken Evolve, went to Dutch limited partners to raise capital for a pre-seed impact fund, the pushback was blunt. “Dutch LPs told us we invest too early,” he says. Every piece of published analysis on the Dutch ecosystem identified early-stage capital as the country’s critical gap. Bakir kept going regardless — and closed the fund oversubscribed at €62M, more than 50% above its initial €40M target.
That persistence is now translating into a permanent presence. Norrsken Evolve, the pre-seed fund that sits within the Norrsken Foundation ecosystem founded in 2016 by Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth, is taking up base at Norrsken House Amsterdam when it opens on September 1, 2026. The Van Gendt Hallen on Oostenburg, a former steam locomotive factory being converted into a fully energy-neutral heritage building, will according to the firm, become the largest Norrsken House in Western Europe at 3,600m².
The gap the data confirms
Techleap’s State of Dutch Tech 2026 report, produced in collaboration with TNO and Invest-NL, identifies the pre-seed and seed stage as the Netherlands’ most critical structural funding challenge. With €2.64 billion in venture capital deployed across 265 deals in 2025 and 11,301 active tech companies, the Dutch ecosystem ranks among Europe’s frontrunners, yet the number of early-stage deals fell 14.5% year-on-year as investors concentrated capital in larger, later rounds perceived as safer. As TFN has reported on the broader European climate tech funding gap, institutional capital accounts for 72% of US VC fundraising but only 30% in Europe, a structural imbalance that hits earliest-stage founders hardest.
The European impact investing market is valued at €190 billion, according to GSG Impact’s market sizing exercise in collaboration with Impact Europe. Norrsken Evolve sits at the pre-seed end of that market, the point where almost no institutional capital reaches, investing up to €500,000 per company in founders building solutions in climate, health, and resilience. Its 75% follow-on rate from external investors suggests the model is working.
The fund has already made two Dutch investments. The first was New Dawn Bio, the Amsterdam biotech developing wood alternatives grown in bioreactors without trees, where Norrsken Evolve was the first institutional money in before introducing the company to CapitalT: also a Norrsken House Amsterdam tenant, which led a follow-on round. The second was Spiral Hydrogen, an Estonian-founded team building green hydrogen infrastructure at the Port of Rotterdam. A third Dutch investment is expected before the end of 2026, with around €3M of the fund’s €62M earmarked for the Dutch market across 5 to 8 deals.
The team, and the competition
The Amsterdam operation is led by Bakir, who has lived in the Netherlands since 2019, alongside local investor Sjoerd Stevens, an Amsterdam native who studied law, became a professional poker player competing at the highest international stakes, then spent 13 years as a professional equity investor before moving into venture capital.
Bakir’s own background spans Geography at Cambridge with a focus on environment and climate, the World Bank, Climate Change Capital, one of Europe’s first major cleantech funds, the family office of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Planet Labs, where he served as VP of Product as it grew into a publicly listed Earth observation business. He subsequently led European operations at Rewire, a digital bank for migrants acquired by US fintech Remitly for $80M.
Norrsken Evolve is not without competition in the Dutch impact pre-seed space. SHIFT Invest, one of the Netherlands’ most active early-stage impact funds, has backed more than 50 companies including Protix and Vandebron. Rockstart, Amsterdam-based and backed by EIFO and APG among others, runs sector-specific accelerator programmes in agri-food, energy, and emerging tech with investments from early-stage through Series B. What distinguishes Norrsken Evolve is its combination of fund scale, the Norrsken sprint programme – an in-person founder development model and the physical co-location strategy at Norrsken House Amsterdam, which places investors and founders in the same building daily.
“We purposely designed Norrsken Amsterdam as a hub where founders working on the most urgent problems of our time – energy, climate, health – sit alongside the investors backing them, every single day,” said Thijs van der Burgt, CEO of Norrsken House Amsterdam. “Having Norrsken Evolve based here means that the earliest-stage founders in our community have access to pre-seed capital or priceless but free advice the moment they need it.”
The fund is backed by the European Investment Fund, which has supported more than 2 million European small businesses since its founding and backs funds including Speedinvest and Samaipata Ventures; Saminvest, the Swedish anchor investor that also backs Alliance Nordic III and prioritises climate and sustainability; and SmartCap, Estonia’s state-owned fund-of-funds which has backed Darkstar and Siena Secondary Fund. Operators Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi invested through their family vehicle Skaala. No Dutch LPs participated.
Whether the Amsterdam base translates that institutional conviction into meaningful outcomes for the Dutch founders most investors still will not back at pre-seed is the question the next fund cycle will answer.
