LundXY

LundXY Global Ventures

Type	Private Company
Industry	Venture capital
Founder	Morten Lund
Headquarters	Copenhagen, Denmark
Number of locations	Hong Kong, London, Singapore, San Francisco
Key people	Morten Lund (CEO), Anya Maxwell (original Partner), Rasmus Boegh (original Partner)
Website	www.lundxy.com

LundXY Global Ventures is an angel investment and startup catalyst headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, founded by serial entrepreneur Morten Lund in 2007. Lund is the seed investor behind Skype, sold to online auction company eBay for US$2.6bn in September 2005, and latterly ZYB, the Danish social networking site sold to Vodafone Europe BV for $49m in June 2008. By 2013 parts of the operation had been superseded by Lund's new OnlyXO network.

From 2007 the firm managed a portfolio of companies encompassing web and mobile telecommunications, content and media, financial services and clean technology.

It backed 2008 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer of the Year Nikolaj Nyholm and his startup Polar Rose, as well as Nyholm's previous start-up Imity (acquired by social networking site ZYB for an undisclosed sum in April of that year). Another company to secure financial backing from LundXY was Aresa, a landmine detection startup named WEF Technology Pioneer of the Year in 2007. After a promising start, advanced field testing in Serbia in late 2008 failed to produce the desired results, with the value of the patents falling into question. Untypically for a LundXY project, Aresa had to be shut down. The third quarter results of 2008 were its last as a biotechnology company.

LundXY was part of the Digital Life Design Community (DLD) and Lund, the architect and ideologist behind the company, was ranked as one of the most influential people in the tech industry. The viewing figures for Lund's blog put it ahead of local newspapers in Denmark, with more than 40,000 monthly readers.

The LundXY catalyst owned the now defunct free daily newspaper, Nyhedsavisen, in its time the most widely read newspaper in Denmark. Its stated goal was to transform the nature of printed press by merging the offline distribution with an attractive online presence. In January 2008, LundXY acquired a 51 per cent majority stake in Dagsbrun Media, which owns Nyhedsavisen, from Baugur Group, the Icelandic investment firm. As part of the deal, Lund XY injected its own working capital into the newspaper. Lund's acquisition came 15 months after the paper's October 2006 launch, and three months after it officially took the position of most read daily newspaper in Denmark, outpacing established paid-for titles and rival free sheets with a circulation of 550,000. Despite this, finances continued to be an issue and the paper eventually closed in August 2008.