Nikolaj Nyholm

Nikolaj Nyholm (born 13 September 1975) is a Danish serial technology entrepreneur and investor from Copenhagen, Denmark. He has founded four technology startups that have pioneered different domains, is an advisor to Minecraft creator Mojang, was a partner at the venture capital investor, Sunstone Capital (today Heartcore), and is currently the founder and Chairman at Astralis.

Nikolaj Nyholm
Born	(1975-09-13) 13 September 1975
Occupation	Businessman investor entrepreneur
Title	Founder and Chairman of Astralis

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.[1] 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 companies like FON.

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,[2] 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.[3]

Nyholm then became the CEO of image recognition company Polar Rose, sold to Apple for a rumored $29 million.[4] In 2008, Nyholm and Polar Rose were named Technology Pioneers by the World Economic Forum.[5]

In January 2010, Nyholm joined venture capital firm Sunstone Capital (today Heartcore Capital) as a partner, where he invested in companies like Neo4j, PeakOn (acquired by Workday, Inc.), and Seriously (acquired by Playtika). Nyholm is a frequent speaker at technology conferences such as DLD,[6] PICNIC,[7] and O'Reilly Etech.[8]