Why is Stockholm, a capital metropolis with a inhabitants lower than a million, dwelling to world manufacturers equivalent to Skype, Spotify, Klarna and Minecraft? “I think it has to do with the Swedish creed,” says Ben Eliass, CEO of bodycare model Estrid. “It’s a nation which put emphasis on high-quality education and invested heavily in telecoms infrastructure in the nineties, so we all grew up with high-speed internet.”
Many additionally credit score a social welfare system that acts as a “safety net” for entrepreneurship. “It allows people to take high risk and start companies, not needing to be too afraid of the downsides,” says Max Junestrand, CEO of legaltech startup Leya. Certainly, Sweden has now produced extra unicorns per capita than every other nation in Europe, apart from Estonia, incomes a popularity because the Silicon Valley of Europe“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 into the talent here, creating a critical mass of engineers, designers and product thinkers that are exceptional at their craft.”
Estrid
As soon as, at a cocktail party, Amanda Westerbom confessed to her mates that she most well-liked to make use of males’s razors. Surprisingly, lots of her mates additionally did—not solely they supplied a greater shave however they had been additionally cheaper. With the assistance of co-founders Alan Aygun and Ben Eliass, Westerbom determined to alter that and, in 2019, they launched razor model Estrid. “We designed the handle ourselves, bought a €500 3D printer from a hardware shop and started iterating,” Ben Eliass, CEO of Estrid, says. “That thing printed hundreds of handles, working day and night. In the end, it almost burned down my house because it was under such strain.” The result’s a 5-blade razor with a vegan hydration strip and an ergonomic weighted deal with that the corporate now delivers to over one million subscribers throughout Europe. “We are dethroning one of the most dominant consumer monopolies of the modern era, becoming a next generation, all-encompassing personal care brand. A next generation Dove if you will.” estrid.com
Atlar
Joel Wägmark, Johannes Elgh, and Joel Nordström met whereas working at fintech startup Vink, which in 2022 was purchased by Visa for $2.2 billion. “We saw firsthand how quickly consumer fintech was changing,” says Nordström. “But the equivalent financial tooling for businesses just did not exist. Finance teams at the vast majority of companies use a mix of Excel, online bank portals, and legacy systems from the eighties and the nineties. It’s a lot of manual work.” Atlar, the bank-to-bank funds platform Wägmark, Elgh, and Nordström launched in 2022, eliminates such complexity by automating funds for companies with a number of financial institution accounts throughout Europe. “We connect directly to traditional banks and provide faster, more UX-friendly tools with which to manage cash, forecast cash flow, and make payments.“ says Nordström. With more than 35 customers across ten countries, including the US, UK, France and Germany, Atlar has raised €13M from investors including Index Ventures and General Catalyst. atlar.com
Leya
Leya has developed a GenAI platform that automates repetitive and manual tasks done by lawyers. “We saw firsthand how lawyers struggled with text and admin-heavy tasks such as filling in templates and extracting information from a large number of documents,” says CEO Max Junestrand. “We want every lawyer to be empowered by AI in their work to accomplish more.” The startup—a Y Combinator alumni—was based in 2023 by Max Junestrand, August Erseus and Sigge Labor. In July 2024, they introduced a $25m sequence A spherical, led by US VC Redpoint Ventures, totalling $36m in funds raised. They’ve over 100 purchasers in ten markets throughout Europe, together with UK agency Hen & Hen, the most important legislation agency within the Nordics, Mannheimer Swartling, and Spanish legislation agency Pérez-Llorca. ”We’re centered on fixing particular authorized duties,” Junestrand says. “This has differentiated us from the group the place the main target lies extra on offering a platform of normal LLM capabilities.” leya.legislation
Lovable
Anton Osika, founder and CEO of Lovable, is on a mission to create what he calls the “last piece of software”. “We made an AI that builds software,” he says. “We launched Lovable to let everyone have the same capabilities that product development teams at tech companies have at their fingertips.” Lovable’s product, GPT Engineer, permits customers to construct web sites and net apps by way of a easy chat interface. “Unlike other AI tools that can code, which 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 more than 2,000 users and a waitlist of 27,000 people from over 154 countries. Lovable has closed a $7.5 million pre-seed funding round led by VCs Hummingbird and by Founders. Also backed by investors including Mattias Miksche, Shopify’s Siavash Ghorbani, Voi’s Fredrik Hjelm, and Creandum co-founder Stefan Lindeberg. “One user built a real-time dashboard for financial data, just by prompting,” Osika says. “She decided to quit her job to build startups with AI tools instead.” lovable.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 north Sweden: the world’s first large-scale green steel plant. Due to its reliance on coal, standard steel production is responsible for up to 9 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Founded in 2020, H2 Green Steel aims to decarbonize steelmaking by using hydrogen gas, which produces water vapor rather than carbon dioxide. The Boden plant is due to begin iron production by 2026, and expects to supply about 5 million tonnes of the metal by 2030. Clients include automakers BMW, Porsche and Volvo. h2greensteel.com
Supernormal
Fabian Perez and Colin Treseler spent weeks brainstorming ideas before they conceived their startup Supernormal. “Technology should give super powers to knowledge workers,” Treseler says. “We drew inspiration from our previous teams at GitHub and Meta, where one of the core work principles was that if a meeting wasn’t documented, it didn’t exist.” Supernormal helps workers before, during, and after meetings, with tools ranging from automatic note-taking creating and sharing detailed agendas and insights from meetings. More than 325,000 clients use the software, including Red Hat, Motorola, Harvard University, Salesforce, Power Digital, and Forbes. They’ve raised a $10m seed round led by Balderton Capital. supernormal.com
Fever Vitality
Fever Vitality develops digital energy vegetation (VVP)—swimming pools of distributed power assets, like photo voltaic panels or batteries, that can be utilized to ship power to the facility grid. “A VVP is just like a traditional power plant,” says Ruben Flam, CEO of Fever Vitality. “A great example would be a fleet of electric vehicles that can discharge energy back to the power grid.” Based by 2022 by Flam, Klas Johansson and Ron Stolero, in February 2024, it raised a €10m seed spherical led by Common Catalyst with the participation of Norrsken VC and La Famiglia. The startup can’t disclose purchasers’ names, however claims they’re already working with giant utility firms and EV producers. fever.power
Neko Well being
Since its launch in 2023, practically 5,000 folks have visited Neko’s well being heart in Stockholm. Contained in the clinic, they underwent a $230 non-invasive full-body scan in lower than an hour that checked for indicators of potential pores and skin, metabolic and cardiovascular illnesses. In keeping with the corporate, the scans recognized doubtlessly critical circumstances in a single p.c of that cohort, together with aortic aneurysms, extreme diabetes and pores and skin most cancers. Launched by Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, the healthtech startup has raised €60 million from traders that embody Atomico, Common Catalyst, and Lakestar. A brand new Neko well being heart in London shall be opening quickly. nekohealth.com
Evroc
Based in 2022 by Mattias Åström, Andreas Birnik, and Andreas Jönsson, Evroc launched out of stealth in 2023 with €13 million in funding from backers equivalent to EQT Ventures and Norrsken VC. In August 2024, it raised an extra €42 million. The mission? To construct a sustainable hyperscale cloud in Europe. “Europe has unfortunately fallen behind in cloud services and American players currently control more than 80 percent of the total cloud market,” says Åström. “We’re founded evroc to put an end to this foreign dominance.” Development of their flagship information heart in Arlandastad will begin on the finish of 2024. “We will also look 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 Might 2024, Italian furnishings designer Arper launched a brand new version of the workplace chair Catifa 53. The unique was made with leather-based, steel and plastic; the brand new model makes use of, as a substitute, a sustainable composite biomaterial manufactured from kraft paper and resins, which is as robust as a fiber composite and as weather-resistant as plastic. This wooden substitute was invented by PaperShell, an organization launched in 2021 by Anders Breitholtz and Mathieu Gustafsson. The fabric shouldn’t be solely utterly fossil free however can even, on the finish of its life cycle, be transformed into biochar. The corporate has raised €13.3 million. papershell.se
This text first appeared within the November/December 2024 version of WIRED UK.
