FAQ

Pinecone is a "venture studio" – a company dedicated to building impactful businesses by collaborating with driven founders. We focus on turning ambitious ideas into successful and meaningful ventures.

Unlike incubators and accelerators, venture studios generate their own ideas, create startups from scratch, provide funding, recruit founders, and actively participate in operations without a fixed timeline. Studios also assume a significant portion of the responsibilities and risks associated with ideation, validation, and launch, making them more deeply involved in the long-term success of their startups compared to other startup support models.

Co-founding with Pinecone is akin to getting 10+ co-founders on your team, for the "price" of one. Through mentorship, network and access to capital, we greatly increase your chances – and speed – of success.  

We partner with people who are determined to create something big, something meaningful. You should possess an unfair advantage, whether industry insights, skills or network/distribution. We mainly base our decision on trust, a shared vision and ambition are must-haves. We also look for traits like: resilience, adaptability, resourcefulness, curiosity, humility, passion, and drive. Last, but not least, we consider the ability to rally people behind a vision, a rare, yet decisive, skill.

While our main focus is to build companies from scratch, with or without a co-founder from the start, we occasionally will look at investment opportunities that align with our portfolio. Such strategic investments should bring value to our existing portfolio companies or vice versa.

Pinecone is based in Oslo, Norway. However, we operate globally with partners of several nationalities and locations, and we invest and build companies globally, too.