Nikolaj Nyholm

Nikolaj Nyholm, (born September 13, 1975) is a 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, and is now a partner at the early-stage venture capital investor, Sunstone Capital.

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 liquidated 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 as a partner. Additionally, Nyholm is a frequent speaker at technology conferences such as DLD,^[6] PICNIC,^[7] and O'Reilly Etech.^[8]

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