KLAK — Icelandic Startups

KLAK - Icelandic Startups traces to a for-profit innovation centre established in 2000 within IT company Nyherji (now Origo) and a non-profit venture, Innovit, launched in 2007 by University of Iceland engineering students, which merged in 2013 as KLAK Innovit after jointly launching Iceland's first business accelerator, Startup Reykjavik, in 2012.

KLAK now runs three to four sector-specific business accelerators a year - including Startup Reykjavik, Startup Energy Reykjavik, Startup Tourism and the climate/circular-economy programme Hringiða - alongside the long-running Gulleggið idea competition, as a non-profit owned by the University of Iceland, Reykjavik University, Origo, the Kria Innovation Fund and the Federation of Icelandic Industries.

More than 3,000 ideas have been submitted to the Gulleggið competition since 2008, over 100 startups graduated its Business Workshop course between 2009 and 2013, more than 500 people took part across 12 Startup Weekend events from 2010-2015, and companies that went through KLAK's 2022 programmes went on to raise over ISK 1 billion from grants and professional investors; early-stage participants have included CCP Games, alongside later graduates Controlant, Meniga and Atmonia.

A two-decade university-industry-government coalition has run Iceland's main national accelerator infrastructure continuously through two rebrandings while keeping the same core ownership, though the ISK 1 billion figure covers an unspecified number of 2022 participants rather than a per-company or audited total, and CCP Games' link to KLAK's specific programmes is asserted in secondary sources rather than detailed in KLAK's own materials.