Sweden raised 2.8 billion this year: the recipe is not in the taxes, but in founder being something worth being

A country of ten million people has attracted 2.8 billion dollars into startups this year, and the estimates are that it will reach at least five billion by the end of it. Last year it was 3.2 billion. The peak is still 2021 with 8.5 billion - the year money was cheap everywhere - but after the cooling, the Swedish ecosystem is heating up again. The figures come from Dealroom.

Sweden already has Spotify and Klarna, but the new wave is more interesting: Legora for legal artificial intelligence, Lovable for programming by description instead of code, Neko Health for medical scanning, Einride for autonomous freight transport. It is not one star - it is a run.

The investor's answer is uncomfortably simple

Sophia Bendz, general partner at Cherry Ventures and a former Spotify employee, explains it as a shift in what counts as desirable. When she worked at Spotify, young people optimised for banking or consulting. "Now, I think a lot of people optimise for creating things and for freedom, and probably for wealth too", she says.

That sounds like a platitude until you look at what sits underneath it. The first generation of founders did not leave - it now mentors, invests and sometimes comes back into the game. Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, is also a founder of Neko Health. People who worked at Lovable and Legora are now starting their own companies, Bendz notes, because they saw up close that it can be done.

Here is the part rarely said out loud: capital follows, it does not lead. Bendz says American investors increasingly land in Stockholm with offers already prepared. "That is confirmation that good companies are being built here", she says. The money is a consequence of the ecosystem, not its cause.

What transfers from this, and what does not

It is easy to look at Sweden and conclude that its model applies nowhere further south - a high standard of living, healthy institutions, a strong social safety net that lets a person take a risk without losing the house. That is true. But one part of the explanation has nothing to do with GDP or with taxes: it is whether founder is something worth being.

That is a social attitude, not a budget line. And it is the part no innovation strategy written in a ministry can produce with a signature. The Swedish cycle - a founder succeeds, stays, invests in the next one - is a mechanism that runs for decades, not a programme with an end date.

The Balkans have talent, have companies working for foreign clients, have people who know this business from the inside. What you see less often is the return flow: a successful founder who stays and finances the next one. Is that a question of money, or of what counts as success once the money has been made?