Are the Nordics really on fire?

0:02Hello and welcome to the Sifted podcast. I'm Sifted's Associate Editor Freya Pratty and today I'm joined by our Europe Editor Mimi Billing. Hi. We're live at Tech Barbecue this week. We're sat in a sort of wooden shack on the side of the event. Mimi, you've been here a bit longer than I. You arrived midday yesterday, so you've seen some more than I have. Tell us what you've got up to so far. yes i mean tech barbecue is actually my first time which feels a bit weird since i'm based in stockholm and uh little denmark is also one of my beats but as yesterday there were like loads of different side events and so i'm gonna do a couple of those and also a dinner with norr sken which is impact hub in stockholm and they also have an impact in barcelona and i think elsewhere as well now but also with altor which is this pe firm that is um run by Harald Mix which is one of the co-founders of Northvolt background and obviously they're very much into impact tech, both Altar and Norskjö so it's quite interesting to see from their point of view with now with climate tech, kind of label dying and so on so it was interesting.

1:16What did they have to say about it? Well we spoke a lot about energy, it was a lot of battery startups there as well a few of them and I think what they want to see is an electrification of Europe and they've been pushing in European Union for that quite a lot which was interesting to hear about but also just to talk about like what can be done differently and why China is going so fast and whilst Europe is taking a long time to actually make decisions and follow them through and so on. I've seen a lot of sovereignty panels are on the lineup which is a similar theme I got here slightly later so this is I've only been in the event a couple of hours but it's already looking like a lot of cool speakers we just watched a bit of the Legora CTO uh his panel and he's going to join the pod tomorrow which is exciting uh but yeah it feels buzzy it feels like there's lots of people around which is cool um so talk to me about because we you are based in Sweden we write a lot about Sweden we probably write less about Denmark what's going on in Denmark what's kind of some of the issues you think founders here are thinking about at the moment?

2:22Yeah, actually, I was just hosting the opening panel here at the BBQ and with actually Danish Minister of Taxation and Economic Growth on the panel, as well as Platpay CEO and Lassie CEO and also a partner from Index Ventures. And it's quite interesting to see that, obviously, this minister is working and has a lot of focus on Europe. but with maybe, I don't know, the issues that's been in Denmark, that they don't have enough role models. They have a lot of state capital being invested, both in defense currently, but also in biotech. And we see that through Novo Nordisk, for example, but also AFO, which is their kind of state-owned investment vehicle.

3:12And we see that most of the investments coming out of Denmark are from these two big players. And it seems to me that a lot of the more private equity is non-existent. I mean, there are early-stage VCs in Denmark and Copenhagen, but they don't have big enough muscles to actually manage to invest this money. And you can see that even if it's great to be a tech barbecue and see so many Danish entrepreneurs and so on, they seem to be maybe lacking the momentum that we've seen in stockholm if you look back on stockholm and the success of sweden i mean we had a spotify ipo which was huge back in the day so i mean that's almost like eight ten years ago now or something like that it's crazy um and then we have clana ipo and then obviously yes we did have the north vault bankruptcy but still just after that then we had like lovable ligora coming uh so many others and i believe that it's kind of the ecosystem has worked better there in some way and i i don't know it doesn't have to do with media as much maybe as the role models and and the ecosystem coming together in some way interesting okay and you'd also mentioned when we talked before that taxation and policy might be part of this question in denmark in comparison to what sweden's doing yeah i think maybe i mean sweden is one of the countries with the lowest tax on businesses.

4:44You wouldn't think so because we always say it's been a socialist country, but actually we do have a very low tax on that. If you look at Norway, for example, they've also introduced a wealth tax, which has become a real big problem because people don't feel like they can actually start a company in Norway in the same way. In Denmark, this was up for discussion a few months ago, and it became an uproar among entrepreneurs here, obviously. And thankfully, it was then voted down. But I think that those kind of discussions even is creating this kind of insecurity in the ecosystem. Like, well, if this could even be like up for grabs, then what's next?

5:26And we know that, I mean, with policy, we were talking about that last night as well, like with policy changes, you can't really rely on them because policy can change with a new government, with a new, even in European Union, we're seeing policy change all the time, right? So I think it's, that hasn't maybe been great for many of the Nordic countries. But also Denmark is so close to the rest of Europe. You would think that they would be able to more become like on the continent with Germany next door, with the Netherlands, which has kind of a bustling climate tech scene right now. and like to be able to yeah and you're right they have these two huge lps which i know um nobunodisk and i eifo um both big in the scale-up fund for example right so there's the money there and it's seemingly spreading out across the continent one thing i thought a lot about looking at sweden from afar recently was particularly in the case of lagora and lovable you have two companies and particularly two founders who are very good at personal branding and marketing do you think there are the examples here in denmark i know perhaps not to the size in terms of money as lagora lovable do you think it's about that there's something in the stockholm ecosystem at the moment that's good at this like spreading the word presenting yourself that yeah isn't happening as much here is that part of it yeah i think so maybe because the ecosystem in stockholm is very much also based on like the angel investors that are also very active on LinkedIn and like and I mean you probably heard of like the Silicon Valhalla actually an expression I really dislike but it's it's become this kind of thesis that Stockholm we are so good that we can do anything and then if people stop believing that then this kind of they will also dare to create these startups which we've seen so we've also seen a lot of like VCs like Inception Fund that's sort of investing in very very early stage startups before, I mean, pre-seen.

7:28And I think that also is creating this kind of buzz around AI agents and stuff. But, I mean, looking at the UK in comparison to the Nordics, I mean, we don't even discuss Neolabs in the Nordics, which is quite interesting because the biggest layers of the new startups are like AI agents. And we do not have, I don't know, we're not actually investing enough in the kind of the skills that is more like deep deep tech yeah stockholm has excelled on the kind of application layer working on top of those models we're better at business yeah yeah why don't you like silicon valhalla i'm interested i think silicon valhalla i spoke quite a few people about that but it's uh it's one way of like maybe you shouldn't compare yourself to silicon valley because silicon valley is if if you compare yourself almost to the bigger ones you always be compared you always be the smaller one that's not as important but you're trying to be this bigger one and also what I American founder that moved to Sweden was saying to me was that actually the people in Silicon Valley they don't want to be they don't want to move to another Silicon Valley they want to have the kind of better living standards not as stressful life as they had in Silicon Valley.

8:54So to try to create a new Silicon Valley, it's not perhaps the thing we should do to sell Stockholm. That's interesting. Are you seeing people move from America or other places around the world into Stockholm for this moment there? I know Lovable have talked about being able to pull people to the city. Yeah, I mean, obviously Lovable is my example. I think we wrote about it at Sifted as well, that their kind of engineering lead moved from like Meta and so on from the US back to Stockholm. He was actually from Sweden or Stockholm originally as well. But we can see that other people are doing similar things.

9:31But we can also see that Swedish people are almost like linking up with other Swedes living in the US to create new companies. So it feels more like everyone believes that they can do it right now, which is a great momentum for Swedish tech. and just hope we could see the same momentum here in Denmark. Yeah. I hear a lot the phrase, the Nordics are on fire at the moment, particularly Sweden, but the kind of general area as well. Is that true? Is it just a Swedish moment, or are there pockets of activity across the wider region, do you think? Yeah, I think there are. I mean, we can see a lot coming from Finland in the deep tech space, which is kind of interesting.

10:11They are not as good at maybe selling themselves, but then they're also a little bit further away from the rest of Europe, So they are a bit of a special case there. But also we can see like, I think some, well, five out of all the kind of few, I think it was 11 investments so far in like Danish startups this year. I mean, it was very few. But five of them were in Odense, which is another, like the third biggest city in Denmark. So it's interesting to see that there are things happening. that when we talk about like the nordic successes so far they are mainly swedish successes but i think it's good for countries like even denmark they were saying yesterday at when they go to china you should talk about like we are from the nordics instead of saying denmark or sweden because the nordics is so small and comparison to somewhere like china obviously so it's like is making ourselves sound a little bit bigger and better.

11:11Yes. Yeah, that's interesting. I randomly spent a month in Malmo, which is just across the bridge from Copenhagen. And a lot of people, there seemed to be quite a lot of tech talent in Malmo, particularly because of Lund University coming over to Copenhagen to work. That seemed to be a dynamic, which I thought was interesting because I was like, Sweden, there's a narrative that that's the place to be. Malmo is in Sweden, but actually they're all coming over here. So I thought that's there an interesting case, those two cities. And I've heard of more and more companies from Malmo recently, which I'm very excited about because I've become a bit of a Malmo fan from spending time there.

11:45I thought that was an interesting dynamic with these two cities in particular. Absolutely. And I think it's interesting if we were talking about that stage as well, that if the Nordics could come together and actually, I mean, because obviously it's going to be really hard to have policies going through the whole of the European Union with like the 27 countries and so on. but it's come up over and over that maybe the nordics could actually have a better or the new nordics with also the baltics could have maybe one try to have one single market or something like that to actually strengthen the region in some way and maybe show if it works or not i think that's really interesting political things that's that's happening and i can see as well that scale-ups in both like in denmark and also in sweden and also in philand are trying to get involved into politics in a way that they haven't before and try to influence politicians to actually be on their side which I feel like it's a it's a new thing that's happening in the Nordics.

12:45I saw on your panel you had a question or you put a question to the panel about a unified stock exchange was that what was the thinking around was that part of this idea you're talking about about a more unified market? Yeah I mean the problem what many of the founders or two of the founders on stage as well was talking about was the fragmentation in europe and when they later on going to exit they will have to almost have to choose a u.s exit like an ipo in new york stock exchange or nasaq in new york and then you have to go to that market too and i think that's that was kind of this idea that we have so many stock exchanges in europe and we have such a problem actually having one big one and like and that was something also the danish minister was kind of like into and and that's why he was talking about you know trying to combine all the kind of nordic countries into more like one economic unit but but i find that that that it's interesting to discuss about discuss it because we talk so much about scale-up fund and so on but we don't really see the whole system from A to A to I don't know Zed you know we are nearly out of time but before I let you go perhaps you can give us a rundown of I know we've talked about the fact that there are less companies of a certain valuation in Denmark but I understand there is a good pipeline coming through who are some of the ones you're watching in Denmark at the moment well I think there are some we have met the founder of well actually not the founder of the comps personal palette this kind of AI agent that's growing quite fast and has raised 3 million.

14:23I mean, this is obviously a very early stage. But then we also have, I mean, this energy start real, which is quite interesting. And we also have like FlatPay, the fintech that I had on stage now as well, that became a unicorn in 2025. And it's expecting like ARR of like 500 million euros next year because of expanding across Europe. I mean, that's interesting. But I think it's also this kind of older companies like Cleo. I mean, it's interesting to see after our colleagues, Damis, reporting whether they will actually continue growing in the same way they have done or what's going to happen with that.

15:03And I think that all these bigger ones as well as smaller ones are really important to see if they can become these kind of role models in the Danish ecosystem. them yeah but i also find like there's a lot of family offices here in denmark and i was talking to an ukrainian startup here yesterday about you know why he's built his company here and it was a lot to do with the danish and ukrainian the ecosystem between the two countries with the war that denmark was very generous early on and that now they have started this kind of like midst capital this ukrainian vc has opened shop here in denmark and copenhagen to kind of push for ukrainian startups to actually start producing weapons here to send back to ukraine and that kind of ecosystem and the money that's going into that but obviously also flood a lot of defense startups and will maybe help the ecosystem in some way at least um you know create more more startups within defense or within security or within something else that can actually okay that's really interesting because i got used to thinking about germany as the kind of defense tech or further east as the defense tech hubs but denmark is that's interesting to add that to this yeah i mean i right now it's not much uh but you can see that the the government money going into this is quite substantial and i i think or you know and denmark doesn't actually have a prime so it doesn't They don't have like a big defense company.

16:42And I think what this kind of Ukrainians or Danish politicians want to do is kind of create this neoprine to try to create some kind of like, you know, expertise in actually how to, you know, deal with the threat of other big states like Russia. Yes. So there's a space there to fill. That's really interesting. Well, thank you, Mimi, for joining us. I will let you go out and enjoy the rest of Tech Barbecue. But listeners, if you have other recommendations of Danish companies we should be following, please also send those across. But thank you. Yeah, thank you, Mimi, for joining. And one of the companies we've mentioned quite a lot throughout the episode, AI Legal Tech Lagora, which is from Sweden.

17:23The founder of Lagora, Max, will be joining us at the Sifted Summit. So you can see him there if you grab a ticket. We'll put the link to that in the show notes. And if you want to follow our other reporting on the Nordics, you can sign up to our daily newsletter. We'll also put a link to that in the episode description. As always, please rate, review and share the pods. And this episode was produced by Aditi Neshra.