Nikolaj Nyholm (born 13 September 1975) is a Danish serial technology entrepreneur and investor from

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

, Denmark. He has founded four technology startups that have pioneered different domains, is an advisor to

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...

creator

Mojang Mojang Studios is a Swedish video game developer based in Stockholm. The studio is best known for developing the sandbox and survival game ''Minecraft'', the best-selling video game of all time. Mojang Studios was founded by the independent ...

, was a partner at the venture capital investor, Sunstone Capital (today Heartcore), and is currently the founder and chairman at

Astralis Astralis is a Denmark, Danish esports organization. Best known for their ''Counter-Strike: Global Offensive'' team, they also have teams representing other games, such as ''FIFA'' and ''League of Legends''. The parent group of Astralis is the A ...

. Nyholm founded Speednames (later renamed Ascio Technologies) in 1999 and sold the company to London AIM-listed Group NBT in January 2007 for $36 million. In 2003, Nyholm founded Organic Network, a provider of managed Wi-Fi systems to large ISPs. The company was closed in late 2005, after having created the successful open source Wi-Fi firmware project

OpenWrt OpenWrt (from ''open wireless router'') is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic. The main components are Linux, util-linux, musl, and BusyBox. All com ...

, which now powers companies like FON. After Organic Network, Nyholm spent a year as European evangelist for

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an ...

, Tim O'Reilly's tech publisher and conference organizer. There he co-organized the European Open Source Conference, among other accomplishments. While at O'Reilly, Nyholm co-founded Imity, a mobile social radar, which was acquired by ZYB, and later by

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public limited company, plc () is a British Multinational corporation, multinational Telephone company, telecommunications company. Its registered office and Headquarters, global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It ...

, for $50 million. Nyholm then became the CEO of image recognition company Polar Rose, sold to

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

for a rumored $29 million. In 2008, Nyholm and Polar Rose were named Technology Pioneers by the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

. In January 2010, Nyholm joined venture capital firm Sunstone Capital (today Heartcore Capital) as a partner, where he invested in companies like

Neo4j Neo4j is a graph database management system developed by Neo4j, Inc. Described by its developers as an ACID-compliant transactional database with native graph storage and processing, Neo4j is available in a non-open-source "community edition" ...

, PeakOn (acquired by Workday, Inc.), and Seriously (acquired by Playtika). Nyholm is a frequent speaker at technology conferences such as DLD, PICNIC, and O'Reilly Etech.

Personal life

He married former Finnish supermodel Niina Kurkinen in August 2017.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nyholm, Nikolaj 1975 births Living people Venture capitalists Businesspeople from Copenhagen