Michael Heiberg

Founder & CEO Ocean.io

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Michael Heiberg is the founder and chief executive of Ocean.io, a Copenhagen company that attacks one of the oldest unsolved problems in business-to-business selling: which companies should you be talking to that you are not already talking to. The conventional answer has always been firmographic filtering — industry code, headcount band, geography — which is a poor proxy for whether a company will actually buy. Ocean.io’s approach is to build AI models of what a customer’s best existing accounts have in common, using signals drawn from how companies describe themselves and what they do rather than from the classification codes assigned to them, and then to find the accounts that resemble them. Heiberg brought an unusual background to the problem: three decades in international enterprise software sales at Oracle and i2 Technologies, followed by twelve years running his own incubator, which is to say he had spent his career on both sides of the question — as the person doing the prospecting and as the person funding companies whose growth depended on getting it right. Ocean.io was incorporated in 2017, bootstrapped initially, and has since raised roughly $10 million, with a January 2022 round led by Peak. Its customers include Sony, UserTesting and Brandwatch.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Ocean.io in Copenhagen in 2017 and bootstrapped the company before taking outside capital.
• Raised a round led by Peak announced in mid-January 2022 — reported as €6 million by European press and $7 million by the lead investor, the same round in two currencies — bringing total funding to roughly $10 million.
• Reported client numbers doubling every two months at the time of that round, with every existing investor participating.
• Built a customer base including Sony, UserTesting, Brandwatch and JGL.
• Positioned Ocean.io as an AI-first data platform integrating with Salesforce and HubSpot, rather than as a static contact database.
• Ran Lezama Management Ltd, his own incubator, from 2002 to 2014, through which he helped grow and exit companies including Kapow Technologies and One Network.
• Held international enterprise sales leadership at Oracle Corporation and a vice-presidency at i2 Technologies during the 1990s.

Professional Journey

Heiberg’s career began in enterprise software sales in the early 1990s — sources place him at SAP early on, and at Oracle Corporation as European Sales Director from around 1992. Selling enterprise software across Europe in that period meant long, relationship-led cycles into large accounts, and it is where the commercial instinct underlying Ocean.io was formed: that the expensive part of enterprise selling is not closing, it is identifying who is worth approaching in the first place.

In 1994 he moved to i2 Technologies as a vice president. i2 was one of the defining supply-chain software companies of the decade, riding an extraordinary run through the late 1990s before the dot-com collapse. The role placed him in a company whose entire premise was that better modelling of relationships between businesses produced measurable commercial advantage — a thesis he would eventually rebuild, in a different domain, three decades later.

By the early 2000s he had moved from operating to backing operators. He worked with the incubator De Zema, and in 2002 formed his own, Lezama Management Ltd, where he served as founder and managing partner until 2014. Twelve years running an incubator is a long apprenticeship in the specific failure modes of early-stage B2B companies, and through it he was involved in growing and exiting several businesses, including Kapow Technologies — the Danish web-data-integration company later acquired by Kofax — and One Network. He was not a founder of these companies; his role was the investor-operator one, which is a different and more repeatable kind of exposure: dozens of go-to-market plans seen from the inside rather than one built from scratch.

That is the experience Ocean.io was founded on. Incorporated in Copenhagen in 2017, the company set out to replace firmographic targeting with what Heiberg has described as lookalike modelling for companies — take the accounts a business already serves well, learn what actually characterises them, and surface the rest of the market that matches. It integrates into the tools sales teams already run, principally Salesforce and HubSpot, on the reasoning that data which does not reach the CRM does not change behaviour.

The company bootstrapped its first years, which is unusual for a data-infrastructure business and constrained how fast it could build its models. Angel and institutional money followed. In mid-January 2022 Peak led a round — announced at €6 million by EU-Startups and $7 million by Peak itself — explicitly to fund expansion into the United States from Copenhagen, a strategy Heiberg has spoken about publicly as remote selling into the American market from Denmark rather than relocating to it. Every existing investor participated, and Heiberg attributed that to traction he quantified as client numbers doubling every two months. Cumulative funding stands at roughly $10 million.

Ocean.io’s customer list — Sony, UserTesting, Brandwatch, JGL — reflects the segment the product was built for: companies with enough existing customers for lookalike modelling to have something to learn from, and enough sales capacity for better targeting to translate into revenue.

Education

University of Copenhagen

B.S., Economics

This rests on self-reported directory data; no university or registrar source confirming it was found.