Ugly Duckling Ventures
Bredgade 21B, Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, 1260, Denmark
Overview
Ugly Duckling Ventures make capital, know-how, and real-world application available to Nordic ventures at the seed & pre-seed stage.
- Total investments
- 15
- Lead investments
- 12
- Investments · 12mo
- 9
- Active investors
- 3
Investment portfolio
- Velatir
Led · Seed · Aug 2026
Velatir provides an infrastructure layer that delivers visibility and controls across AI tools, employees, autonomous agents, vendors, devices and underlying infrastructure. The platform combines AI security, policy enforcement, usage monitoring and discovery, offering real-time visibility into AI activity, data flows, costs and the maturity of individual use cases. Companies can establish centralized guardrails across systems and access a catalogue of more than 4,000 AI tools. Velatir has built its platform entirely on European-owned and hosted infrastructure and intentionally does not use US hyperscalers to emphasize data sovereignty, resilience and control. The company launched commercially prior to this seed round and plans to use new funding to expand across Europe and grow its team. Velatir was founded by Michael Sørensen, Elias Sørensen, Christian Møller and Andreas Paulli.
- Wilmo.ai
Led · Seed · Aug 2026
Wilmo.ai builds AI-native customer support solutions for e-commerce businesses, focusing on automating workflows to deliver substantial efficiency gains. Early customers have reported roughly +80% improvements in customer support efficiency and have switched from established helpdesk vendors. The company emphasizes deep automation rather than competing on price, and investors cite strong early product-market fit and customer love. Wilmo is led by founder Villads, who is founding his second company and has prior U.S. experience. The team is described as lean, fast-moving, and aligned around AI-driven productivity, and the recent pre-seed funding is intended to accelerate product and commercial growth.
- Palette
Led · Seed · Aug 2026
Palette is building an operating system for companies to work with multiple AI agents while keeping their internal context, workflows and knowledge durable. Its Palette Desktop application enables teams to use agents such as Claude Code and Codex directly on files and folders, with options to choose cloud-based or local models depending on speed, capability and data control needs. The broader Palette OS includes a company-owned context library, shared AI skills and a connector gateway to let tools be connected once and used across multiple agents. Palette Desktop is available to paying customers and the Palette OS is being used by design partners. The company raised €3 million in a 2025 pre-seed round and plans to use the proceeds to grow sales and continue product development.
- Skyfora
Led · Seed · Jun 2026
Skyfora's core product is software that converts delays in GNSS signals received at telecom tower timing receivers into continuous, minute-by-minute atmospheric profiles (humidity, temperature, pressure). Founded in 2019, the company leverages existing telecom infrastructure so deployments do not require new hardware at sites. Skyfora has completed its first live deployment of Telecom GNSS Meteorology in Europe and won the Deloitte Innovation Accelerator Ventures for Impact award in 2025. The company plans to expand commercially across Europe, the US, and the Middle East and to deepen partnerships with telecom operators and AI weather-forecasting platforms. Financially, Skyfora raised €6.5 million in the latest round and has raised about €11 million in total including prior equity and grants. Its positioning aims to provide high-frequency ground-up atmospheric data to improve weather and climate intelligence for industries such as energy.
- P-Secure
Participated · Seed · May 2026
P-Secure has built a platform enabling large-scale background checks in compliance with European law, targeting protection of physical access to critical infrastructure. The company reports commercial traction with more than 100 companies and public authorities as customers and a newly developed platform launched within its first year of operations. Its team includes former personnel from PET, police and the military, and founders are Lars Andreasen, Thomas Julian Gravers, Nicklas Bo Løwe and Glenn Jensen. P-Secure has a board comprising Simon Øelund, Andreas Green Rasmussen and Niels Vejrup Carlsen. The company is valued at DKK 200M following the seed financing and intends to use proceeds to accelerate European expansion.