Norrsken Foundation’s hub opens in Rwanda, to house 1,000 entrepreneurs by next year
In 2019, Swedish coworking space and investment fund Norrsken Foundation announced the launch of its first entrepreneurship hub outside the Scandinavian nation in Rwanda.
The center, located in Kigali, has finally opened up to the region, though it is happening in two phases. The first, which took place yesterday, will welcome 250 entrepreneurs. The second phase hopes to bring in over 750 additional entrepreneurs to the Norrsken House in Kigali by December 2022, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
“We have massive demand we can satisfy to become the biggest physical hub for startups in Africa,” said the managing director of Norrsken East Africa, Pascal Murasira. “We believe Kigali is on a path to become one of Africa’s leading clusters for tech and startups, and we want to help accelerate that journey.”
The Kigali center is the first of 25 hubs the Norrsken Foundation plans to open globally over the next decade, according to founder Niklas Adalberth, the Klarna co-founder who left the unicorn fintech in 2016.
The foundation sees itself as “nonprofit, nonpolitical and nonpartisan” with a mission to help entrepreneurs solve the “world’s greatest challenges.”
In addition to its coworking space in Stockholm, Norrsken runs an impact accelerator program and an impact VC fund of €130 million.
In Africa, alongside Norrsken House in Kigali, the foundation also manages an Africa-focused seed fund. While Norrsken mentioned in 2019 that its seed investments ranged from $25,000 to $100,000, with plans to make later-stage investments from $100,000 to $1 million, it did not give any update on its fund size this time.
The organization only stated that it made a handful of investments into companies based in Rwanda, the two most recent ones being Viebeg Technology and PesaChoice.
While the pandemic played a huge role in the project delays, Norrsken said it continues to follow the timeline it laid out when starting in 2019.
“We think about launching Norrsken House just in the same way as we think about launching a product. You get it out there before it’s ready, to involve users and get feedback on how to perfect it,” a company’s spokesperson said. “We don’t have all the answers, and we need our users to help us shape the final product. Construction will continue and operations will gradually come online throughout the first half of 2022.”
