Niklas Zennstroem

Niklas Zennstroem is a founding partner and serves as CEO and partner of Atomico. He is also an advisor to Vay. He is a member of the board of directors of Oden Technologies. He has been a board member of Fon, Pipedrive and Farmdrop. He founded Atomico in 2006 to help entrepreneurs, mostly based outside of Silicon Valley, scale their businesses domestically and internationally. So far, he has invested in more than 50 companies on four continents and works closely with a number of portfolio company leaders so they can benefit from his own experience as an entrepreneur. Prior to founding Atomico, he co-founded Skype, where he served as CEO from inception until September 2007. In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay Inc for $3.1 billion, the largest European venture capital exit to date. Skype was then bought out by the consortium it was part of and in 2011 was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in cash. In 2006 Time Magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people. He has received numerous awards for his entrepreneurial work, including being named Entrepreneur of the Year by the European Business Leaders Awards (2006), the KTH Grand Prize from the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology (2009), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute (2011), the His Majesty the King Medal (2013) and the Gold Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering (2013). In 2007 he co-founded the charity Zennstroom Philanthropies, where he is actively involved in combating climate change, improving the state of the Baltic Sea and encouraging social entrepreneurship. He is also a keen yachtsman and has won three world championships in the Mini Maxi class and one world championship in the TP52 class with his racing team Ran. He has also served as an executive director at Firstminute Capital. He is a board member of Lilium Aviation and Orbital Systems. He is a seasoned entrepreneur who previously co-founded and led globally successful technology companies including Skype, Kazaa, Joost and Joltid. He holds a dual degree in business and a master’s in engineering physics/computer science from Uppsala University in Sweden, and spent his final year at the University of Michigan. He has worked as an advisor at Jolicloud. He is also an angel investor.