The Startup Hunter Diary — A Month Long Trip Around Europe — Episode 22

Nordic unicorn

One

We made it to Stockholm with Hubert on Sunday, after a long flight.

It was a first time in Stockholm for both of us, and despite the clear thermic shock, we took advantage of this Sunday afternoon to visit the city a little.

We found out that some of the best incubators of the city were linked with the universities. It’s actually not very surprising, the Swedish education system is well known for its high level of excellence.

So that’s we did. First stop, we tried to go meet with the people of the business lab of Stockholm School of Economics. Unfortunately, we didn’t find anyone, but we got put in contact with their director so hopefully we will get to meet them.

Coming up next on our list: the Royal Institute of Technology KTH. They are home to a bunch of initiatives, which we found out when we got there. Initially we came to meet with KTH innovation. Though we first met with Things by STING. To be honest we met with them first because they were the first we managed to find on this campus.

STING stands for Stockholm innovation & growth, and has been ranked among the top 10 best incubators in the world… And Things is one of their incubator/program dedicated on hardware and IoT.

And apparently we were really lucky. Indeed, members of the STING team were there, and we got to talk with them. But we also got the chance to meet with the CEO and founder Pär Hedberg, who is one of the most influential figures in the Stockholm start-up ecosystem. #nottooshabby

We learned a lot about the local scene by talking with those guys and they showed us some of the cool companies out of Things. And they told us about one key point for us.

Start-ups in Sweden have no problem to raise a pre-seed from business angels, up to 300–400k euros. They also have no problem at all to raise a Series A round from the Swedish VCs. But, they are having a lot of trouble with their Seed round, for amounts ranging 500k and 2M euros. #sweetspot

Now we wanted to go to KTH innovation. They are acting as a sort of pre-incubator for STING, but it’s still very interesting for us as we try to know entrepreneurs as early as possible. They helped us with the directions at Things, but we still had a little trouble finding it.

When we finally got there, there were only incubated companies, so we didn’t manage to connect with them yet. But we have been given the contact to talk to and hopefully will have time to meet before Thursday. But anyway we need to go back to KTH because they have so much more initiatives we learned about later.

We finished our first visit of KTH in one of their coworking space, Open Lab, to get a little work done before our last stop of the day.

This evening there was the STHLM Tech Meetup. This is the biggest start-up meetup in Stockholm. They meet monthly to give updates on what’s happening in Stockholm, and there is really a lot going on. It was a big event and hopefully we will manage to get many Swedish start-ups to join our pitch competition.

That’s it for today, and it’s already enough. We are in Stockholm until Thursday so come connect with us if you are around.

Hop on the train of the most exciting start-up trip ever made, and travel with us! It shall be fun.

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