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Robin Wänlund
Associate
Early Days & Entrepreneurial Spark
I grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm with my sister and dad, spending much of my time playing tennis. Before any formal job, I spent weekends and holidays selling whatever I could — newspapers, candles, strawberries, even algorithms for solving the Rubik’s cube. While I can't pinpoint exactly what sparked my interest in entrepreneurship, it’s been a constant theme ever since.
First Venture & Lessons Learned
At university, I co-founded a profitable tutoring business focused on physics and math. We had no prior experience and learned by doing — marketing our services at high schools, printing flyers with our student IDs, and keeping overheads minimal. When we realized tutoring wouldn’t scale, we reinvested profits into a startup that matched developers with early-stage companies. The idea was ok — the execution was less so. We built the product before validating demand. Looking back, we should’ve started manually, built customer relationships, and iterated from there. With graduation looming and cash running low, we pivoted to the full-time roles we had lined up.
From Finance to Venture
I joined BlackRock’s Aladdin Client Services team in London, focusing on portfolio compliance. It was an intense and rewarding experience, but I missed the creative energy of startups. That led me to Alliance VC, where I worked closely with Anders (ex-CCO at Kry/Livi) and Henrik (ex-CEO at Lifesum). It was a deep dive into venture and confirmed that this is where I want to be long term.
Operator Perspective
I later joined one of Alliance VC’s portfolio companies as Head of Business Development to gain hands-on experience in how a venture-backed startup actually operates. Managing everything from sales, financial reporting, and customer success taught me lots that I wasn’t able to see from the investment side.
Venture investing at Notion Capital
At Notion, I focus on early-stage business software startups across the Nordics and UK & Ireland. I’m especially interested in application-layer AI, vertical SaaS, and founders with strong commercial drive, where I can dig into the full go-to-market process from day one. Outside of work, I’m usually out on a run or playing padel.
