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by | Mar 16, 2018 | Hosta

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Nikolaj Nyholm (born 13 September 1975) is a Danish serial technology entrepreneur and investor from Copenhagen, Denmark. He has founded seven technology and gaming startups that have pioneered different domains, is an advisor to Minecraft creator Mojang, was a general partner at the venture capital investor, Sunstone Capital (today Heartcore), and a senior advisor at The Raine Group.[1]

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.[2] 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, which now powers Wi-Fi routers like those from Ubiquiti and those based on Qualcomm's QCA Software Development Kit.

After Organic Network, Nyholm spent a year as European evangelist for O'Reilly Media, Tim O'Reilly's tech publisher and conference organizer. There he co-organized the European Open Source Conference,[3] among other accomplishments. While at O'Reilly, Nyholm co-founded Imity, a mobile social radar, which was acquired by ZYB, and later by Vodafone, for $50 million.[4]

Nyholm then became the CEO of image recognition company Polar Rose, sold to Apple for a rumored $29 million.[5] In 2008, Nyholm and Polar Rose were named Technology Pioneers by the World Economic Forum.[6]

In January 2010, Nyholm joined venture capital firm Sunstone Capital (today Heartcore) as a general partner, where he invested in companies like Neo4j, PeakOn (acquired by Workday, Inc.), and Seriously (acquired by Playtika).

In 2016, Nyholm left Sunstone to found four-time esports Major champion Astralis and Counter-Strike league BLAST Premier which today also operates Fortnite Champion Series[7] for Epic Games and BLAST Rainbow Six[8] for Ubisoft.

In 2020 he founded the video game studio Scattershot, rumoured to be creating a shooter video game[9] together with original Counter-Strike creator Minh Le.

Nyholm is a frequent speaker at technology conferences such as DLD,[10] PICNIC,[11] and O'Reilly Etech.[12]

Personal life

He married former Finnish supermodel Niina Kurkinen in August 2017.[13]

References

  1. ^ "Nikolaj Nyholm". The Raine Group. Retrieved 22 September 2023.
  2. ^ Web Hosting Provider Group NBT Acquires Ascio Technologies
  3. ^ EuroOSCON 2006
  4. ^ Danish Mobile Social Network ZYB Acquired By Vodafone For €31.5 million
  5. ^ Apple buys Polar Rose for a rumoured $29 million
  6. ^ World Economic Forum commends Polar Rose
  7. ^ Šimić, Ivan (22 March 2023). "BLAST renews Fortnite Champion Series partnership for 2023". Esports Insider. Retrieved 22 September 2023.
  8. ^ Kalro, Nikhil (13 December 2022). "Ubisoft and BLAST lay out the R6 Global Circuit with Multi-Year Deal". Esports.net. Retrieved 22 September 2023.
  9. ^ Shah, Bhavya (7 October 2020). "Counter Strike Creator & Astralis chairman form new Co. » TalkEsport". TalkEsport. Retrieved 22 September 2023.
  10. ^ DLD Conference, Nikolaj Nyholm
  11. ^ Picnic Conference, Future Technology Trends
  12. ^ ETech summary, day 3
  13. ^ "Ex-malli Niina Kurkisesta tuli erovalmentaja". anna magazine. 3 May 2018. Retrieved 3 May 2018.
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