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Sweden, and the Nordics in general, is a small VC market, albeit a high end segment, producing top class tech startups. AI is hot, tech adoption is higher than the Euro average and building a passive income side gig is a national sport for the middle class.

this high end segment is much better served compared to a few years ago since the European VC ecosystem has matured, with tier one funds now writing early checks, backed by operational support, and don't require you to relocate to San Francisco. The YC trade-off (uproot yourself, take a standard deal, move to a cohort model) is a harder sell when the local alternative is decent.

YC otoh relies heavily on a strong brand doing the work automatically, backed by a few events here and there, where they send their European partners - in Sthlm they brought in the big guns, namely PG and his wife Jessica, usually not as involved in the GTM efforts.

this is a demand generation trip, which means they're worried about pipeline. Competition, baby!

the problem is that the VC product has been commoditized. Sequoia with Arc, a16z with Speedrun and 20vc with Project Europe all offer the same bundle - check, cohort, US network, friction reduction. That makes the YC differentiation thin - a Nordic founder gets to choose between brands offering the same functional outcome. At which point brand alone determines the winner - however, big funds implicitly can offer something YC cannot: a near-guaranteed warm path to a superior round from a tier-one fund which is closer to home than the open market YC creates at Demo Day.

there’s another layer to that - the scouts, which are also disruptive to the accelerator model, and Stockholm in particular is as crowded as it’s ever been, with everybody and their mothers commissioned for this sales job of writing pre-emptive checks. Think about it this way - ICP is mostly repeat founder or middle managers looking for own gigs. Who's getting them before they build anything? Scouts, angel networks, and warm relationships prevail over formal programs and brand reputation lose it to whoever is in the room first. Their money buys startups time for de-risking as well as theoretical further access to un-opened doors.

YC's defensible advantage in the Nordics has narrowed to one specific founder profile: someone building a company that needs US market entry as a primary GTM, who doesn't yet have warm tier one US VC relationships, and for whom the dilution and relocation cost is acceptable. Product is access compression - things that would take two years to build through relationships, you get in three months through association with YC. That's the value prop that today is as competitive as ever.

not least, I’ve said it before, this strategic game is done because professional investors optimise for not losing, not to win. It’s the American way, the opportunity cost of losing a big deal is higher than all the marketing spend, and note the local up and coming European name following the same blueprint of spending on grassroots efforts heavily supported by the media.

and make no mistakes - all this expensive marketing scheming is done for a very thin layer at the top of the market, a TAM of maybe 20-50k people in Sweden that fits a certain profile, converting probably 20-30 checks a year.

that profile is mostly consensus-driven, VCs are like that, even though they claim otherwise. Which makes it harder for every other founder in the market not fitting their specific business case, who are maybe of a different pedigree or just the odd ones out, talking about something that sounds dumb to consensus thinkers.

so what those other startup builders can do, which is the majority of the market - stay out of all this marketing noise and talk to the right people, build product/business and plan for growth and financing in a proper way. And btw, we’ve got something for them over at N9.

30 startups - 10 from DACH, 7 Brits, 7 French, 4 from the Nordics, one Italian and one Polish.

in general, the top of the line reinforces an European bullish case - if historically Europe doing tech startups meant cloning US software ideas, this list is far more original, with the startup quality structurally improved.

the Germans and Swiss went en-masse to YC this spring, inverting the default assumption about European startup geography. The cohort skews toward Europe’s forte, namely industrial, hard-tech, and infrastructure plays - by contrast, the UK cohort is almost entirely software/AI-wrapper plays.

also notable the broad narrative transition from copilots (which suggest) to agents (which execute) - almost half of the startups uses the term agent in their pitch. Massive tech leap in only one year allowing for advanced products doing automated end-to-end workflows which they call agents.

the batch has quite a few companies competing with each other - Gojiberry vs Pulsent vs Revnu doing B2B sales, or Prism vs Asendia vs Standout in AI recruiting. All those are basically service businesses rebuilt as software agents.

two startups are competing directly with Claude Cowork - OpenWork and Kuli, making it a category. All while Claude quietly killed Code last week. Interesting open-source GTM angle to be noted as well.

Pairio has gotten an elegant product approach for an un-sexy vertical and also liked a British crew selling their robots on a usage-based model, which is bold for a hardware company - and what all the old SAAS outfits would like to transition to.

keep an eye on Kugel Audio, building a sovereign European foundational voice model in 30 languages out of Germany. It doesn’t sound like a wrapper - rather a product built at the most sought-after intersection of European money managers: AI model + infrastructure + geopolitical thesis + data residency requirements + general European hostility to US tech dominance. Everybody else on the program uses someone else's model.

speaking of Euro American antagonism, there’s one defence tech company part of the batch - the Swedish from Tenet, which is kinda weird, considering.

also interesting to note the somewhat weak Nordic presence, compared to last year’s 13 startups part of the program, which was an all time high. Maybe this number alone explains why PG was in town. 😀

five of them raised money post graduation btw - Bluebook, Vantel, Vesence, Crunched and Alice AI. Alas I know some others have raised too but didn’t announce, so you won’t find them on our N9 records.

the full detailed list with all the 30 startups in tomorrow’s intel email, sent to our customers along a bunch of must-read intel coverage of the European VC landscape - you should subscribe and get it too.

Active American investors in Europe (other than YC, that is)

Europe’s most active late stage investors.

Europe’s most active AI investors

Europe’s most active angels

Defence in Europe - startups that raised and active investors across the continent

Robot startups in Europe (about 90 names)

European startups building data centers in space - essentials

Kone from Finland bought its German competitor TK Elevator for €29.4 billion to create the world's largest lift maker by sales - one of Europe's biggest takeover deals in recent years, and one of the largest exits for European private market.

Fluidstack raised $5.7 billion via junk bonds, which carry a 6.25% interest rate with a five-year maturity - did so via a JV vehicle funded by Coatue. Fwiw, the Brits raised at a rumoured $7B post last year from a SF hedge fund ran by a 25 years old German researcher.

Stripe launched a bunch of cool shit this week, if you don’t pay attention you won’t understand why 200B is a low valuation for the Irish.

Belgium plans to nationalize all the country's nuclear power reactors, and says that plans to decommission the plants are now halted with immediate effect.

the Brits are concerned that aligning too closely with EU regulations could smother British innovation - because the UK might be forced to adopt the EU AI Act, which is currently the world’s strictest regulatory framework for machine learning. They’re not wrong.

OpenAI and Anthropic lead the AI companies leasing more than 1 million square feet in London since early 2025, or about 7% of all new leases.

Microsoft launched a dedicated AI legal agent for Office, while the VCs in Legora’s and Harvey’s captable are publicly bickering like in high school. Meanwhile, an Oxford lawyer vibe coded an open-source alternative for Legora/Harvey, backed by a free legal research AI focused on United States law.

the estimate for Euro area annual inflation is expected to hit 3% in April 2026. The primary culprit is a massive surge in energy prices, which saw an annual rate of 10.9% in April, up from just 5.1% the previous month.

more macro - China ordered its national companies to ignore US sanctions on domestic oil refiners that Washington said were buying Iranian oil.

btw, China now supplies 90% of Russia’s sanctioned technology imports, up from 80% last year. Yeah, Russia is still at war with Europe, in case you forgot.

if you are a UK tech founder holding unlisted shares valued above £2.5 million, you are the most affected cohort in the UK tech ecosystem. If you die, the shares will bear inheritance tax - that is.

start-up bankruptcies have surpassed successful exits for the first time in Europe and the US, while insolvency activity in the UK and EU rose by nearly 50% year-over-year.

inside the stranger-than-fiction case of a 210M raise at 1.6B British defence deal.

probably the best take I read vis a vis Sifted’s clickbait content.