The North is rising

Why the Nordics and Baltics will produce a trillion-euro company, and why it matters

It’s 19 years since we founded ArcticStartup and 18 years since we started Slush. In those two decades the Nordic and Baltic countries learned how to build startups and how to invest in them. What was once a curiosity became a routine. Spotify, Klarna, Supercell, Wolt, Bolt, Wise, Oura. The ecosystem grew up.

Now we’re entering a new phase.

Globalization is unwinding. Supply chains are fracturing along geopolitical lines. Hot wars are being fought on European soil for the first time in a generation. In this new world, the ability to create and scale technology companies is no longer just an economic nice-to-have but a prerequisite for sovereignty and prosperity.

Europe is waking up and rising to the challenge, but the Nordics and the Baltics understand this better than most of Europe, partly because we spent 20 years building the muscle, and partly because geography has always made us clear-eyed about security. That combination is producing something remarkable.

The prominent Swedish angel investor and builder Mattias Miksche captured it well when he reflected on what happened during 2025: “Something I didn’t expect — founders moving to Sweden to start their companies here. Not California. Not Berlin. Not London. Stockholm. Because the talent is here. The peers are here. The capital is here.”

Currently Stockholm is setting the pace, but the other Nordic and Baltic capitals are not far behind. Lovable and Legora from Stockholm are taking on the US category leaders head-on, while Spotify, Oura, and Vinted have become de facto global category leaders. The Nordics and Baltics are done learning. We are now ready to lead. The region is no longer a feeder system for Silicon Valley. It’s becoming a destination.

I believe we are on the cusp of seeing the first trillion-euro companies born not just in Europe but in the Nordics and Baltics.

That sounds wild. It’s happening sooner than most of us expect.

Take off

The Nordics and Baltics have 33 million people and a combined GDP of roughly $2 trillion which is about 7% of the US economy. Yet the region has produced more than 85 unicorns, which works out to approximately twice as many billion-dollar companies per dollar of economic output as the United States. To put it differently: if the US produced unicorns at the same rate as the Nordics and Baltics relative to the size of its economy, it would have over 1,300 of them instead of 650.¹

Spotify, born in Stockholm in 2006, reached a peak market cap of €145 billion last June. Oura is on track to reach $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and is now valued at $11 billion. Vinted crossed €1 billion in revenue in 2025, surpassed €10 billion in gross merchandise value, and delivered its second consecutive year of profitability. Bolt passed €2 billion. Wise, founded by two Estonians, generates more than €1.5 billion in annual revenue as a publicly traded company. Visma crossed €3 billion in total revenue.

The pace is accelerating. In 2020, the region had roughly 40 unicorns. Five years later it has more than double that. Nine percent of all billion-dollar exits globally come from here. The capital infrastructure exists: over €8.5 billion in combined annual venture investment across the Nordics and Baltics which amount to roughly 11 percent of Europe’s total from less than 5 percent of its population.

Silicon Valley took about 40 years to go from its first billion-dollar company to its first trillion-dollar one. The Nordics already have a company that peaked above €145 billion. The trajectory is compressing, not stretching. The infrastructure, the capital density, and the talent flywheel are all in place. The question is not whether the region can produce a trillion-euro company. It’s which one, and how soon.

Acceleration

The best technology companies don’t slow down as they scale. They accelerate. Apple took eleven years to go from $100 billion to $1 trillion. Amazon did it in three. Nvidia did it in two and a half.

This region has been producing $5–10 billion companies for two decades. Skype sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Supercell was valued at $10 billion when Tencent bought it. King sold for $5.9 billion. Wolt for $8.1 billion. These weren’t failures. They were acquisitions by the world’s largest technology companies who recognised that some of the best builders in the world were working out of Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn — necessary steps in growing up the region’s muscle memory and level of ambition.

The difference now is that the companies are staying independent long enough to start approaching the global leaders and eventually becoming ones.

Spotify has crossed $100 billion in market cap. Behind it, a cohort is stacking up at the $10 billion threshold: Visma at $22 billion, Klarna IPO’d at $17 billion, Oura at $11 billion, with Wise, Bolt, and Vinted approaching or crossing that mark.

This isn’t an outlier. It’s a generation.

A company at $10 billion today, growing at the rate of the best technology companies, could reach $1 trillion within a decade.

The infrastructure is here. The capital is accumulating. The founders are staying. The only question is which company catches lightning in a bottle.

And yet.

During these same 20 years, something else happened. While the US built a media ecosystem to match its technology ambitions — newsletters, podcasts, long-form analysis — the Nordics and Baltics never did. The region learned to build world-class companies. It never learned to tell the world about them. Starting ArcticStartup was an attempt to put this in motion already in 2007, but we still know more about what's happening in San Francisco than in Tallinn or Helsinki.

And the coverage that does exist has been shaped by a global narrative that has turned against technology. At the exact moment when technology leadership became essential to our freedom and prosperity, the public conversation became dominated by fear and cynicism.

The Nordics and Baltics deserve a voice that matches their ambition. One that tells the stories of the founders and companies that are shaping our future — and makes the unapologetic case that building technology is among the most important things our societies can do right now.

That’s what The Flame is for.

I’m not picking up the keyboard after 20 years because I’m nostalgic. I’m doing it because we need to understand and champion the people and companies our future depends on.

Subscribe and join me in championing the Nordic and Baltic technology founders and the companies they build. The first deep dive drops on Monday. The north is rising.

1. Nordic and Baltic unicorn count from Dealroom (2025). GDP figures from IMF World Economic Outlook 2025: Sweden $600B, Norway $540B, Denmark $400B, Finland $300B, Iceland $28B, Estonia $40B, Latvia $40B, Lithuania $72B, combined approximately $2 trillion. US unicorn count approximately 650 per Dealroom 2025. US GDP approximately $28 trillion. Unicorns per trillion of GDP: Nordic/Baltic approximately 48, US approximately 23.