Sweden’s startups will raise $5 billion in 2026. Our secret sauce is 150 years old

Sweden keeps getting described as small, but its startup numbers keep refusing to act that way. The country’s founders are on track to raise $5 billion in 2026, up from $3.2 billion in 2025, and the names leading that charge are already huge: Lovable at a $13.3 billion valuation, Neko Health at $7 billion, and Legora at $5.55 billion.

This is not just a hot year for AI apps. The argument from Sweden is that the real story goes back much further, through Spotify, Klarna, and Skype, and even earlier to IKEA, H&M, and Tetra Pak. Long before that came the “snilleföretag,” the inventor-led firms of the late 19th century, a tradition that includes Ericsson, ASEA, and Atlas Copco.

That history matters because the country has built repeatable conditions for turning ideas into companies. Sweden still uses “professor’s privilege,” which lets researchers own the intellectual property from their inventions. A single professor’s lab at Uppsala University has produced about 20 companies, including Olink, which sold to a US life sciences giant for $3.1 billion in 2023. Sweden also files more patents per person than almost every other European country, hosts four of the world’s top 130 universities, and is ranked second on the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization innovation list.

Patience is part of the formula too. Sweden spends around 3.6% of GDP on research and development, the highest share in the EU, and that money feeds everything from deeptech and industrial companies to life sciences. The source points to the Uppsala spinout behind Leqembi, one of the first drugs to slow Alzheimer’s, and to AstraZeneca’s largest factory in Södertälje as proof that Sweden still likes hard, slow problems.

Then there’s the social piece. The country’s safety net makes it easier to take a shot without betting the family house on it, and that seems to create its own recycling loop: winners put money back into the system. Niklas Adalberth did it with Norrsken after Klarna; Karl-Johan Persson does it from the H&M side of the family tree. Put it together, and Sweden looks less like a lucky outlier than a place that has spent 150 years learning how to keep inventing itself.