From Switzerland's Founderful to Italians Founders Fund and the Dutch Operator Fund, a new batch of European VC firms says it is working as "entrepreneurs backing entrepreneurs."

Perhaps still too early to refer to a trend, Swedish fund Node.vc has entered this club today by raising 71 million euros to invest in Nordics and Baltics-based startups.

"I hope it's a beginning trend," said John Elvesjö, managing partner at Node.vc, in conversation with TechCrunch. "Europe has been hugely lagging behind the U.S. when it comes to operational experience in VC investors …. There is huge marketing around being founder-led and operator experience, but it often turns out pretty superficial when you scratch that surface."

Node.vc's connections to entrepreneurship run far deeper than skin deep. That's true of its investment team — Elvesjö, (second-to-last on the right in the picture) co-founded Swedish eye-tracking startup Tobii, which went public in 2015. But that's also true of its limited partners, which include 70 founders. While they have no compulsion to add more than money, they have a natural penchant to invest their time, too.

However, Node.vc probably wouldn't have closed a fund of this size without, at the same time, closing a similar one with institutional investors. Its LPs include Saminvest, Sweden's fund-of-funds, and the life and pension arm of Nordic bank Nordea. That's pretty interesting for a first-time fund, and doubly so for one that takes an unusual approach to VC math.

"We deliberately keep it a bit oversized, meaning that we have more people on the team than what the fund normally finances. And the reason for this is we are entrepreneurs and we are building a VC firm," said Elvesjö.

Node.vc should have enough hands on deck with eight full-time and eight part-time staffers, some of whom previously worked at Nordic VC firm Brightly Ventures, to back the seven startups it plans each year.

The rest of the equation is more typical for a fund of that size. "We write an average entry ticket of €1.3 million euro, and we can follow on for a very long time," Elvesjö said. "We can actually invest even up to 10 million euro in one single company if we want.".

The fund already has three deals in the bag and is sector-agnostic but focuses on three themes: the future of entertainment-through the portfolio company Roro, for example, a gaming studio; the future of work, which Lemonado and Starhive represent; and platform technologies, including fintech, IoT, cloud infrastructure, and machine intelligence.

These themes come to relate with the strengths and sectors which the Nordics are known for, but Elvesjö and his friends only come to understand this after much effort in research:.

"We did this huge investment in figuring out where trends are going, and then we condensed it and put it in a slide, and what the slide says is we think the Nordic ecosystem will be good at what it has been good at before," he laughed.

Paradoxically, the fact that several Scandinavian unicorns let people go could also be good for its startup scene. "Talent in the Nordics is more available than it's been for the last five years," says Elvesjö. That's precisely what makes Node.vc particularly bullish about its geography: AI tools are set to "disrupt pretty much every industry," and the Nordics are "extremely well positioned to harvest this."