Luminar Ventures is a new seed investment firm founded in Stockholm by local angels Magnus Bergman and Jacob Key.

Luminar Ventures is a newly announced investment firm from Stockholm, Sweden at the beginning of 2018.

The company was founded by local angel investors Magnus Bergman and Jacob Key, backed by investment manager Daniel Karsberg and by CFO Linda Höglund.

Luminar will rely on a SEK 500M ($60M) investment fund, mainly paid for by the Swedish Government, through its LP, Saminvest (which placed SEK 180M), and its co-founders, Sting and KTH Holding.

In addition to the State, Swedish Church is a minority LP, with SEK 50M, along with ten other undisclosed private investors.

Luminar is looking to invest in seed and early stage startups with global scale and ambitions, aiming at an average investment of around 10 MSEK ($1.1M).

The announcement comes as the number of investments under $1M (pre-seed and seed level) from Scandinavia has seen a 15% drop since 2016 (358 vs 424). The number from the $1-5M range has also slightly gone down - so it makes sense a bit of consolidation at the early stage level on the supply side.

The data is available here.

Luminar's appearance is not a singular move in the Nordics, as at the end of 2017 we had another announcement of a smaller, angel fund, The Nordic Web Ventures, with about 50 angels as backers, looking to write $50k investment tickets.