Sweden startup ecosystem
Sweden consistently produces outsized startup success relative to its population — from Spotify to Klarna. Stockholm is Europe's per-capita unicorn capital, with deep expertise in fintech, gaming, and SaaS. A strong engineering culture, early adoption of digital services, and access to Nordic and global capital markets give Swedish startups a durable edge. The directory currently lists 121 organisations across 11 cities.
Showing 1–20 of 121 Sweden
Cities in Sweden
Types in Sweden
Sweden results
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Almi Invest
Almi Invest is the venture capital arm of the Swedish state-owned group Almi, investing risk capital in early-stage startups alongside private co-investors. One of the most active early-stage investors in Sweden, it backs companies across technology, life sciences and cleantech and recycles returns into new companies.
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Anton Osika
Swedish entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Lovable, a Stockholm-based AI coding startup that lets people build software through natural language. He previously co-founded the e-commerce product-discovery company Depict.ai and was an early engineer at Sana Labs, with earlier research work at CERN.
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Anyfin
Anyfin is a Stockholm-based fintech founded in 2017 that helps consumers cut the cost of their existing loans and credit-card debt by refinancing them at lower rates, using a photo of a statement and data-driven credit assessment. It has expanded from Sweden into Finland, Norway and Germany with a focus on reducing borrowing costs rather than lending more.
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BackingMinds
BackingMinds is a Stockholm-based venture capital firm founded in 2016 that deliberately invests in founders and markets overlooked by mainstream investors, backing early-stage technology companies in the Nordics and beyond. Co-founded by Sara Wimmercranz and Susanne Najafi, it focuses on 'blind spots' where it sees underestimated potential.
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Brickanta
Brickanta is building an AI-native operating layer for early-stage commercial construction planning. The platform interprets drawings, code constraints, and cost data to automate bid analysis and estimation, reducing procurement risk and planning overhead for project owners and contractors.
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Candela
Candela is a Stockholm-based marine technology company founded in 2014 that designs and builds electric hydrofoil boats and ferries, which lift out of the water on computer-controlled foils to cut energy use dramatically and extend the range of electric propulsion. Its models include leisure craft and the P-12 electric passenger ferry, and it aims to eliminate fossil fuels from waterborne transport.
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Chalmers Ventures
Established 2015 (building on earlier university incubation). Venture builder and fund for tech startups from Chalmers University using an Encubation model; provides pre-seed funding, business coaches, and lab access. Notable spin-offs include Minesto and KomboSat. Scope: Regional (West Sweden).
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Christina Brinck
Christina Brinck is the President of Volvo Group Venture Capital, the corporate venture arm of the Volvo Group focused on investing in transformative technologies for sustainable transportation, logistics, and manufacturing. She leads strategic CVC investments in deep tech and software startups that align with the Volvo Group's long-term innovation agenda across mobility and industrial sectors. Brinck is a confirmed speaker at NORDEEP 2026 representing the corporate venture perspective in the Nordic ecosystem.
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Cleantech Capital Day 2026
The 20th-edition annual conference connecting the Nordic and Baltic cleantech ecosystem, with startup pitch competitions, workshops, and one-on-one investor pitching. Explicitly founder- and investor-focused.
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Creandum
Creandum is one of Europe's leading early-stage venture capital firms, founded in Stockholm in 2003 and now operating from Stockholm, Berlin, London and San Francisco. It backs technology companies from seed to Series A and has been an early investor in category-defining businesses including Spotify, Klarna, Bolt, Kahoot, Depop and Pleo. In 2024 it closed its seventh flagship fund at around 500 million euros to continue backing European founders.
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Daniel Ek
Daniel Ek is the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, the world's largest music streaming platform, which he launched in 2006 and took public on the NYSE in 2018. Outside Spotify, Ek is an active angel investor and a key figure in Stockholm's thriving tech ecosystem. Through his personal investments and Prima Materia, his private investment firm, Ek backs early-stage European startups across healthcare, AI, defense tech, and consumer technology. He invested EUR 100M into Prima Materia to support moonshot companies working on some of Europe's hardest problems. Ek has also backed several Nordic startups directly as an angel, and his presence in the ecosystem has helped attract global attention and talent to Sweden's startup scene. He is widely regarded as one of the most successful European tech founders of his generation.
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Detectify
Detectify is a Stockholm-based cybersecurity company founded in 2013 that offers an external attack surface management and web-vulnerability scanning platform, powered by a crowdsourced community of ethical hackers whose findings are automated into its product. It helps security teams continuously discover and monitor their internet-facing assets for weaknesses.
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DevSum 2026
Stockholm's premier developer conference at Kistamässan, with 70+ international speakers across web development, architecture, AI/ML, and cloud.
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Eco Wave Power
Eco Wave Power is a Stockholm-headquartered, Nasdaq-listed wave-energy company that develops onshore and nearshore wave-energy conversion technology attached to existing marine structures such as breakwaters and piers. It runs projects in multiple countries, including Gibraltar, Portugal, Israel and the Port of Los Angeles, aiming to make wave energy a scalable clean-power source.
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Einride
Einride is the Swedish pioneer of autonomous freight, best known for its cab-less "Pod" trucks that are designed from the ground up without a driver. Rather than retrofitting automation into traditional vehicles, Einride built a purpose-made electric platform paired with remote operations. Its "Mesh" system allows a single human operator to supervise multiple autonomous pods in real time from a control center, enabling higher utilization while keeping safety oversight in the loop. The year 2026 is a defining moment for Einride. Following a merger with Legato Merger Corp. III, the company began trading on the Nasdaq Global Market on 10 June 2026 under the tickers ENRD and ENRDW, at a pre-money valuation of roughly $1.35B and with a $113M PIPE raised ahead of the debut. This public-market transition gives Einride the balance sheet to scale fleet deployments, charging infrastructure, and regulatory approvals across key logistics corridors. By mid-2026, Einride is executing on major commercial contracts with GE Appliances in the United States and DP World in the UAE. It does not sell trucks in the traditional sense; it sells freight capacity as a service (FaaS), bundling vehicles, energy management, and its digital "Saga" operating system that optimizes routes, energy usage, and scheduling. The 2026 focus is on "Einride Grids": dense regional networks in Northern Europe and the US Southeast where autonomous pods handle repeated hub-to-hub routes, driving down costs compared to diesel trucking while cutting emissions. Einride's ecosystem ties include Norrsken House in Stockholm and early innovation pilots through Plug and Play. Its investor base blends Nordic growth capital and strategic logistics backing: EQT Ventures, NordicNinja, Maersk Growth, Soros Fund Management, and Temasek are among the key supporters. In 2026, Einride stands out as the most mature European autonomous freight platform, combining electric hardware, autonomy software, and logistics orchestration into a single commercial service. The company is also investing in safety validation, regulatory engagement, and remote-operations tooling to scale autonomy responsibly across multiple jurisdictions.
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Elypta
Elypta (Elypta AB) is a Solna-based biotech company developing a metabolism-based liquid biopsy, the MIRAM Kit, for early cancer detection. It measures the GAGome, a set of systemic biomarkers of tumor metabolism in urine, and applies machine learning to noninvasively detect cancer signatures. Elypta is a main partner in the EU-funded PREDI-LYNCH project, a pan-European hereditary multi-cancer screening initiative for people with Lynch Syndrome that received EUR 13.6 million in EU funding, and it has completed the largest kidney cancer recurrence monitoring study using its urine test. The company holds ISO 13485:2016 certification.
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EnginZyme
EnginZyme (EnginZyme AB) is a Solna-based biomanufacturing company that uses a patented enzyme immobilisation technology to create bespoke, stable biocatalysts for multi-step enzymatic reactions. Its aim is to make chemical and materials manufacturing greener and cleaner by unlocking enzymes as an alternative to conventional chemical processes, with applications spanning industries such as personal care ingredients.
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Epidemic Sound
Epidemic Sound is a Swedish company headquartered in Stockholm that operates a royalty-free music and audio licensing platform for content creators. Founded in 2009, it provides creators, businesses, broadcasters and agencies access to a library of music tracks and sound effects, owning the rights to its catalog so users can publish and monetise content without separate licensing. The platform offers a Studio tool, mobile and desktop apps, and integrations with software such as Adobe Creative Cloud. In March 2021 it raised a growth round led by EQT Growth and Blackstone at a reported $1.4 billion valuation.
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EQT Growth
EQT Growth is the growth equity arm of EQT, one of Europe's largest alternative investment firms headquartered in Stockholm. Launched in 2019, EQT Growth manages over EUR 4B and invests EUR 30-200M in high-growth technology companies scaling across Europe and globally. The fund focuses on category-leading software, fintech, and marketplace businesses at Series C and beyond. Notable investments include Vinted (led its EUR 250M Series F), Mollie, Epidemic Sound, and Small Giant Games. EQT Growth leverages the broader EQT platform's industrial network and 30+ years of operational value creation expertise.
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EQT Ventures
EQT Ventures is the VC arm of EQT Group, launched in 2016 in Stockholm with offices in London, Berlin, and San Francisco. Managing over EUR 2.2B, the firm invests EUR 1-25M from seed through Series C in AI, fintech, mobility, and marketplaces. EQT Ventures uses Motherbrain, its proprietary AI deal-sourcing platform, to identify opportunities early. Portfolio includes Einride, Epidemic Sound, Voi, and Wolt. The fund leverages EQT's network of 300+ industrial advisors for strategic support.
