The Nordic Mentor Network of Entrepreneurship (NOME) is an elite mentoring programme for Nordic life science start-ups founded in 2016. The leading start-up accelerator in the Nordics, Accelerace, was chosen to build the network.
The vision for NOME was twofold. Firstly, to propel the most promising Nordic start-ups providing health and industrial biotech solutions into internationally renowned commercial successes by leveraging the knowledge of high-profile mentors with global networks. Secondly, to connect the Nordic ecosystem across the life science sector to facilitate knowledge exchange and create critical mass to attract global capital and partnerships to Nordic life science companies.
Since its inception, NOME has enrolled dozens of promising companies from across the Nordics, Baltics, and northern Germany, which together have raised more than DKK 3.2 billion, and onboarded around 150 highly experienced investors, serial entrepreneurs, and high-profile life science executives as mentors. The NOME mentors provide value in the form of introductions to investors and commercial partners, assist with license agreements and transactions, and provide pivotal input to business strategies and product development.
NOME is led by Accelerace and governed in collaboration with nine partner organisations: Karolinska Institutet Innovations (Sweden), Medicon Village Innovation (Sweden), Uppsala Innovation Centre (Sweden), Vertical, Turku Bioscience Center (Finland), Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator (Norway), Aleap (Norway), the BioInnovation Institute Foundation (Denmark), Life Science Nord (Denmark), and ScanBalt (Estonia).
In 2016, the Foundation awarded a grant of nearly DKK 20 million to Accelerace to establish the network. This was followed by a grant of DKK 13.5 million in 2021 and a further DKK 29.3 million in 2024, for the period until 2028.
