Why is Stockholm, a capital with less than a million inhabitants, home to global brands such as Skype, Spotify, Klarna and Minecraft? “I think it has to do with the Swedish creed,” says Ben Eliass, CEO of personal care brand Estrid. “This is a nation that has placed an emphasis on high-quality education and invested heavily in telecommunications infrastructure in the 1990s, so we all grew up with high-speed Internet.”
Many people also credit the welfare system for acting as a “safety net” for entrepreneurship. “This allows people to take big risks and start companies without being too afraid of the downsides,” says Max Junestrand, CEO of legal tech startup Leya. Indeed, Sweden has now produced more unicorns per capita than any other country in Europe except Estonia, earning it a reputation as Europe’s Silicon Valley “Stockholm has a truly unique ecosystem where you can stand on the shoulders of giants,” says Colin Treseler, CEO of Supernormal . “They have invested an incredible amount of resources in this talent, creating a critical mass of engineers, designers and product thinkers who are exceptional at their craft.”
Estrid
One day at a party, Amanda Westerbom told her friends that she preferred men’s razors. Surprisingly, many of her friends did the same – not only did they offer a better shave, but they were also cheaper. With the support of co-founders Alan Aygun and Ben Eliass, Westerbom decided to change that and in 2019 launched the Estrid razor brand. “We designed the holder ourselves, bought a 3D printer for €500 at a hardware store and started working on iterating,” says Ben Eliass, CEO of Estrid. “This thing printed hundreds of handles, working day and night. In the end, it almost burned down my house because it was under so much strain.” The result is a 5-blade razor with a vegan lubrication strip and an ergonomic, balanced handle, which the company now supplies to over a million subscribers across Europe. “We are dethroning one of the most dominant consumer monopolies of our era by becoming the next-generation all-in-one personal care brand. The next generation of Dove, if you will.” estrid.com
horses
Joel Wägmark, Johannes Elgh and Joel Nordström met while working at the fintech startup Vink, which was acquired by Visa in 2022 for $2.2 billion. “We have seen first-hand how quickly consumer fintech is changing,” says Nordström. “But equivalent financial tools for businesses simply did not exist. Finance teams in the vast majority of companies use a combination of Excel, online banking portals, and legacy systems from the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a lot of manual work.” Atlar, Wägmark, Elgh and Nordström’s interbank payments platform launching in 2022, eliminates this complexity by automating payments for businesses with multiple bank accounts across Europe. “We connect directly with traditional banks and provide faster, more user-friendly tools for managing cash, forecasting cash flow and making payments,” says Nordström. Serving over 35 clients in ten countries, including the US, UK, France and Germany, Atlar has raised €13 million from investors including Index Ventures and General Catalyst. atlar.com
That
Sympathetic
Anton Osika, founder and CEO of Lovable, is on a mission to create what he calls “the last software.” “We created artificial intelligence that creates software,” he says. “We launched Lovable to give everyone the same capabilities that product development teams at technology companies have at their fingertips.” Lovable’s product, GPT Engineer, allows users to create websites and web applications using a elementary chat interface. “Unlike other AI tools that can code and can take hours to generate results, Lovable gives people instant feedback and allows for rapid iteration,” Osika says. Launched in 2023, the startup currently has over 2,000 users and 27,000 people on the waitlist from over 154 countries has closed a $7.5 million seed funding round led by VC Hummingbird and founders, with support from investors including Mattias Miksche, Shopify’s Siavash Ghorbani, Voi’s Fredrik Hjelm, and Creandum co-founder Stefan Lindeberg “The user created a dashboard for real-time financial data simply with prompts,” says Osika. “She decided to quit her job to build startups using AI tools instead.” dear.dev
H2 Green steel
In January 2024, cleantech startup H2 Green Steel raised €4.75 billion to complete its flagship project in Boden, a city in northern Sweden: the world’s first large-scale green steel plant. Due to its dependence on coal, standard steel production accounts for as much as 9 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Founded in 2020, H2 Green Steel aims to decarbonize steel production using hydrogen gas, which produces water vapor rather than carbon dioxide. The Boden plant is scheduled to start producing iron by 2026 and is expected to deliver approximately 5 million tons of metal by 2030. Customers include car manufacturers BMW, Porsche and Volvo. h2greensteel.com
Supernatural
Fabian Perez and Colin Treseler spent weeks brainstorming before creating their startup Supernormal. “Technology should give superpowers to knowledge workers,” says Treseler. “We drew inspiration from our previous teams at GitHub and Meta, where one of the basic rules of work was that if a meeting isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist.” Supernormal helps employees before, during and after meetings with tools that include automated note-taking, creating and sharing detailed agendas and meeting insights. The software is used by over 325,000 customers, including Red Hat, Motorola, Harvard University, Salesforce, Power Digital and Forbes. They raised $10 million in a seed round led by Balderton Capital. supernormal.com
Fever Energy
Fever Energy develops virtual power plants (VVPs) – pools of distributed energy resources such as solar panels or batteries that can be used to transmit energy to the power grid. “VVP is like a traditional power plant,” says Ruben Flam, CEO of Fever Energy. “A great example would be a fleet of electric vehicles that can feed energy back into the grid.” Founded by 2022 by Flam, Klas Johansson and Ron Stolero, it raised a €10 million seed round in February 2024 led by General Catalyst with participation from Norrsken VC and Family. The startup cannot reveal customer names, but says it already works with enormous utilities and electric vehicle manufacturers. fever.energy
Neko Health
Since its launch in 2023, Neko health center in Stockholm has been visited by almost 5,000 people. At the clinic, they underwent a $230 non-invasive full-body exam that took less than an hour and checked for signs of potential skin, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. According to the company, scans showed potentially grave conditions in one percent of this cohort, including aortic aneurysms, severe diabetes and skin cancer. Founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, the health tech startup has raised €60 million from investors that include Atomico, General Catalyst and Lakestar. A fresh Neko health center will open soon in London. nekohealth.com
Euroc
Founded in 2022 by Mattias Åström, Andreas Birnik and Andreas Jönsson, Evroc launched out of stealth in 2023 with €13 million in funding from backers including EQT Ventures and Norrsken VC. In August 2024, it raised another EUR 42 million. Mission? Building a sustainable hyperscale cloud in Europe. “Europe is unfortunately lagging behind in cloud services, and US players currently control over 80 percent of the total cloud services market,” says Åström. “We founded evroc to end this foreign domination.” Construction of their flagship data center in Arlandastad will begin in slow 2024. “We will be looking for suitable locations for our own data centers in France and Germany,” says Åström. “By 2030, we expect to have a network of 10 hyperscale data centers across Europe.” evroc.com
PaperShell
In May 2024, the Italian furniture designer Arper launched a fresh edition of the Catifa 53 office chair. The original was made of leather, metal and plastic; the fresh version instead uses a sustainable bio-based composite material made from kraft paper and resins that is as mighty as fiber composite and as weather-resistant as plastic. This wood substitute was invented by PaperShell, a company founded in 2021 by Anders Breitholtz and Mathieu Gustafsson. Not only is the material completely free of fossil fuels, but it can be converted into biochar at the end of its life cycle. The company raised EUR 13.3 million. Papershell.se
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK.