At Dreamcraft, we invest in European tech-driven companies from pre-seed to Series A. We are generalists with a proven track record in iGaming, gaming, esports, D2C, B2B SaaS, and decarbonization. We believe success is created by a team of dreamers and crafters – and we are venture engineers who help the two. The right founders love our engagements that go deeper than just advice.
The founding partners of Dreamcraft, Jesper Søgaard and Christian Kirk Rasmussen, have co-founded and still manage the company Better Collective A/S. Jesper and Christian have crafted the company all the way from a two-bedroom apartment startup in 2004 to IPO in 2018 without raising funding from investors. In early 2021, the market cap passed 1 billion USD. Jesper and Christian are a great example of a founder team in true Dreamcraft style where you can think of Jesper as the dreamer and Christian as the crafter. Founder teams that hold both dreamer and crafter capabilities are the type of teams we like and look for.
Eventually, Jesper and Christian became angel investors, and one of their investments was in TrunkBird, where Daniel Mariussen was one of the founders. They were Daniel’s first investors, and their startup-investor relationship is what we want to replicate in our founder engagements. After TrunkBird closed down, Daniel was looped into Jesper and Christian’s angel setup, which eventually evolved into a traditional VC firm. We have raised $35 million for our first fund and have invested in 19 companies. Furthermore, we have grown into a team of 9, and Carsten Salling became General Partner in Dreamcraft in 2021. We expect to launch a second fund of $70-90 million in early 2022.
Our mission is to amplify dreams and help entrepreneurs turn dreams into reality. We are all about supporting talented founders and acting as an innovation enabler through close engagement with founders who are building the businesses of the future. The Dreamcraft team holds an impressive record of learnings from founder experiences from Better Collective, TrunkBird, and our portfolio companies. Therefore, we want to make sure that the founders we support do not make the same mistakes we did. By providing our portfolio companies with knowledge and sharing experiences, we aim to enable entrepreneurs to be innovators.
After nearly 10 years as investors in gaming and esports, there are several reasons why we are excited about the industry.
First of all, we believe that it is a huge market that will only continue to grow – today, over 50% of the global population are millennials and Generation Z. Those generations are born in a digital environment with games at the epicenter of their lifestyles. Secondly, gaming has evolved to more than just the games themselves – it has extended to community, entertainment, as well as social, for the players behind the screens. We see tremendous potential for startups that extend their focus to the social and community elements, and this opens up exciting investment opportunities.
Innovation sparks ways of including the community all the way from production for gaming and esports startups. One of them, Hiber, allows for self-expression through user-generated content, and the community element is present in edutainment with GamerzClass as a great example. We think this is just the beginning of how social and community will be included. With esports, gaming has become a complete entertainment experience, even surpassing some of the major sports leagues around the world in terms of viewership.
Esports is, however, also much more complex than traditional sports, with constant server changes, updated content, new gaming IPs, etc., which is why data is becoming the missing commodity everyone in and around the industry needs. We see great potential in businesses tackling the infrastructure side of things, and GRID esports is a great example of this.
In addition, technological advancements have accelerated the ability to build gaming companies fast and paved the way for new use cases and new ways to monetize. We are excited to see how NFTs and blockchain technology will influence gaming and esports in the future.
