News from our network

All news
Dear Mr. Hewson, Thank you for submitting your tape of "U2" to RSO Records, we have listened with careful consideration, but feel it is not suitable for us at present.

Patrik Backman

General Partner

,

Helsinki

A General Partner at OpenOcean, Patrik’s heart lies with the “data-intensive” bit of our investment thesis. Before starting OpenOcean, Patrik co-founded MariaDB, and spent 6 years managing product and business development at MySQL AB, where he served as a Director of Software Engineering from 2003 to 2008, and managed the company’s strategic technical alliance with SAP AG. With his business hat on, Patrik was part of MySQL Management Team, and worked in management consulting at eCraft Management Solutions and A.T. Kearney. Patrik is on the board of Nosto, Booksy, Supermetrics, Import.io, AppGyver and MindsDB, works closely with NearGroup, and has held directorships at Ironstar Helsinki, MariaDB, and SkySQL. He received a Master of Science (Engineering) degree from Helsinki University of Technology and Master of Science (Finance) from Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki.

Investment theme coverage

Horizontal & vertical AI automation
Agentic infrastructure & developer tooling
AI technology
AI-enabled services

Team

Investment Team

Portfolio

News highlights

All news
8
min read

Three things the State of Quantum 2026 report tells an early-stage investor

The State of Quantum 2026 report shows quantum computing maturing into a real market. For investors, the biggest opportunities lie in enabling infrastructure today and commercial adoption tomorrow.
6
min read

Why are we still building development teams like it’s 2020?

Twenty-five years ago, I could have written that same sentence and replaced “AI” with “the Web,” and forty years ago, “the personal computer.” This is not an article about needing to use Claude or other agentic AI tools; that is something you should be doing already. In this case, I’m talking about a fundamental restructuring of how software gets built and deployed.
9
min read

Portfolio spotlight: Dreamfold

Welcome to our portfolio spotlight series, where we highlight the teams behind some of the most ambitious technical companies. A company is only as strong as the people behind it, which is why we share the stories of the teams driving these disruptive innovations.