Wiski Capital — no relation to Scottish Whiskey exports — is the investment-vehicle brainchild of 24-year-old Norwegian salmon-farming billionaire, Gustav Magnar Witzoe, and his business partners.
Witzoe is the son of SalMar owner Gustav Witzoe, who holds over 50-percent of the company’s stock through his investment business, Kverva, itself owned by Witzoe’s arms-length entity, Kvarv. SalMar did EUR 1.11 billion in business in 2017.
Now Witzoe Junior has started spreading the wealth of salmon-farming into IT start-ups. He’s paired up with a known Norwegian tech-entrepreneur.
“I saw that it was hard to operate alone when you’re completely green as an investor, and there’s a lot to learn from a guy like Oystein (last name Skiri, recently of a company called Boostcom),” Witzoe said.
It isn’t clear just how much farm-raised winnings the fast-learning Witzoe intends to sink into start-ups, but in 2017, during his fund’s launch, the Trondheim-based Wiski pumped what is understood to be installments of EUR 50,000 of vital seed capital into hungry but promising start-ups.
“We made six small investments in 2017, and it’s that level we’ll be sticking too, depending on the (business cases) we come across,” Witzoe was quoted by Shifter as saying.
His older, U.S.-educated business partner, Skiri, 42, is listed as a consultant in one of those start-ups, Disruptive Technologies. The other is Huddlestock, once the brainstorm of Murshid Ali, and now a tech offering to make “ordinary people” into competent investors via an app that aggregates professional investor’s trades into “your trade”.
Well done, Witzoe Junior.
