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Aker's family venture fund opens its cap table: RunwayVC takes outside LPs for Fund II

The Oslo firm co-founded by Kjell Inge Rokke has a 40 million euro first close and Halliburton, Investinor and KLP among its new backers. Fund I produced 24 investments and two exits.

The Investor · Invest desk

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Photograph accompanying Aker's family venture fund opens its cap table: RunwayVC takes outside LPs for Fund II
Photo: techfundingnews.com

What happened

  • RunwayVC, formerly RunwayFBU, has closed a first 40 million euros for Fund II, aimed at pre-seed and Series A industrial AI, robotics, automation and autonomy.
  • The firm launched in Oslo in 2021 with 300 million kroner and Aker as its sole backer.
  • Fund I has made 24 investments and 23 follow-ons since 2022 and reports two exits, only one of which appears on the firm's own website.

Why it matters

  • exposure Halliburton, Aker BP and Aker Solutions are simultaneously fund investors and prospective customers, so a founder's route to first revenue runs through people who own a slice of the manager...
  • constraint The speed advantage Baekkelund credits to having one backer is precisely what a multi-LP register removes: future funds come with a fundraising calendar and a wider set of people to answer.
  • contradiction The realised record supporting an institutional raise is two exits, and the firm's own site shows one, so incoming LPs are underwriting process rather than distributions.
  • precedent A family holding company converting its captive vehicle into a co-invested fund, with other Norwegian industrial families joining as LPs, gives the next Nordic family office a template to copy.

Forty million euros buys about 20 companies on the firm's own plan, spread over three to five years [2][11]. Initial cheques of 500,000 to 1 million euros put the cost of that programme at 10m to 20m euros, a quarter to half of the first close [12][24]. The remainder is reserve, and Fund I says the reserve gets spent: 24 initial investments generated 23 follow-ons, 47 decisions in total, close to one-for-one [27][22].

The pitch that assembled the new LP list is a multiple on other people's money. Fund I launched at 300 million kroner and its portfolio has since raised more than 2 billion kroner from outside investors, roughly 6.6 times the fund's original size [5][13][23]. That is a syndication record. It is a real skill, and it is not the same thing as money returned.

Tor Baekkelund's account of the sequence is unusually candid: a single backer was chosen so the team could act rather than spend years fundraising, with outside LPs always the intention [9]. Fund I's results then brought other industrial companies asking to join [10]. So the first fund bought the track record and the second fund sells it, which is the ordinary path a captive vehicle takes to become an institutional one.

The word "institutional" is doing some work here. Aker remains the principal investor, and Aker BP and Aker Solutions are on the LP list alongside Halliburton, KLP, Investinor and several Norwegian industrial families [7]. About 70% of investments to date sit in Norway and the Nordics, with the rest in Europe including WSense and Telgea [14]; hold that ratio and roughly 14 of the 20 Fund II companies land in one region [26]. A broader LP register does not by itself widen the aperture.

Sagar Chandna's chosen comparable is Germany's HV, an early backer of Neura Robotics [21], while the structural cousin in the source material is corporate venture, of the kind Emerald Technology Ventures runs with its 62 million dollar physical-AI fund with Japan's DIC [19]. The claimed difference is that RunwayVC's anchor is a family-controlled holding company rather than a strategic corporation [20]. That distinction is worth something only if the holding company's interest stays portfolio value rather than adjacency to its own operations, and Oyvind Eriksen's framing, citing Cognite and Nscale as proof that technology creates value when combined with deep industrial expertise, points at adjacency [16].

Fund II's opening cheques went to Minerva in humanoid robotics and HIVE in autonomy [8]. Both sit in categories where the round after the first one tends to be much larger than a five-person team writing million-euro cheques can lead [12]. Which means the thing under test in Fund II is not the thesis of connectivity, intelligence and autonomy that Chandna describes [17], but whether the syndication engine that carried Fund I's portfolio to 2 billion kroner still works when the buyers of the output are also the owners of the fund [1].

What to watch

  • The final close number, and whether follow-on reserve grows in proportion to the 20-company target rather than staying at first-close scale.
  • Whether the second, undisclosed Fund I exit is named, and on what terms.
  • The first commercial contract between a portfolio company and Halliburton, Aker BP or Aker Solutions, which is where the LP-as-customer model either pays or creates a conflict.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence42
Adoption58
Hype gap+22
Incentives74
Confidence46
Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

  1. [1]

    RunwayVC's model includes limited partners such as Halliburton, Aker BP and Aker Solutions that are also potential customers of its portfolio companies.

    ReportedSupported2 sources— create a free account to open themView cited source
  2. [2]

    RunwayVC has completed a first close of 40 million euros for its second fund, focusing on pre-seed and Series A companies in industrial AI, software, robotics, automation and autonomous systems.

    ReportedSupportedView cited source
  3. [3]

    RunwayVC was formerly known as RunwayFBU.

    ReportedSupportedView cited source

Sources

1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.

  1. techfundingnews.com

    1 article · August 24, 2026

    RunwayVC hits €40M first close for Fund II to back industrial AI and robotics

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  • Corporate and family LP structuresFollow
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