Backing New Nordic & European technical brilliance at inception.

“We’re seeing a new wave of young and incredibly talented entrepreneurs from the Nordics. I'm more excited than ever about Europe as a place to build businesses. The surge in talent we're witnessing right now is astounding.” Daniel EK

New winds are blowingacross Europe - both in founder ambition and in geopolitical tailwinds. The continent is coming together to build and invest in the infrastructure and policies needed to compete at a truly global maximum, with initiatives such as EU-Inc gaining significant momentum, alongside increased investment in technological sovereignty. While Silicon Valley has compounded for decades (Sequoia Capital alone is more than 50 years old), Europe is still early. 

The current AI platform shift is catalyzing a fundamental mindset reset across the continent. The Draghi report underscored the urgency to act on AI and technological leadership to drive the future of the continent. Europe must respond with the ambition the world expects of us. Europe has a deep history of research excellence, a high density of technical talent, and world-leading institutions - European and Nordic researchers and computer scientists have been central to many of the world’s most important innovations - from backpropagation to Linux and the invention of the World Wide Web itself. Many, if not most, of today’s leading researchers in AI and LLMs also originate from Europe.

We are witnessing tectonic shifts in the European technology and venture capital landscape. A new generation of European founders is emerging: more fearless, more technical, and more ambitious than ever before, aiming for global category leadership from day one. As a result, outcomes will be greater in scale and frequency than ever before.

In 2025 alone, Europe produced more than 50 new unicorns and, for the first time, generated more $1B+ outcomes than China and APAC combined. Europe has now cemented itself as the world’s second-largest unicorn factory after the US. Within Europe, the New Nordics are once again defy their size, with recent unicorns such as Lovable, Legora, Sana, Modal, and Linear founded by entrepreneurs from the region. At the same time, global AI leaders like Databricks and Cursor already have Nordic founders at their core.

Research shows that technical founders build tech giants. Building a tech unicorn is hard - let alone a trillion-dollar tech giant. They succeed because they solve really complex problems with technology. Founders with deep technical expertise are far more likely to be able to do that. 

We believe that a critical reason Europe has never produced a trillion-dollar tech giant is that it hasn’t produced enough technical founders who start companies here. But this is changing. Fast.

A new generation of technical founders is emerging in record numbers—armed with more experience, role models and bolder ambitions than ever before. In Europe, for the first time, more than half of the founders of startups that became unicorns in 2023 and 2024 have technical backgrounds.

Europe and the New Nordics boast world-class engineering universities and exceptional technical institutions. For instance, DeepMind’s origins can be traced back to Cambridge and UCL, with early backers from e.g. Finland and Estonia.

We believe Europe and the New Nordics is now entering the decade of decacorns. Between 2015 and 2025, Europe normalized the creation of unicorns. Between 2026 and 2036, we believe Europe will normalize the creation of decacorns - alongside multiple Spotify-scale outcomes ($100B+) and eventually Europe’s first $1T tech company.

From Stockholm, the Inception Fund sits at the center of this shift as a catalyst - bridging the New Nordics, Europe, and the global AI ecosystem. We believe in New Nordic and European exceptionalism, deeply connected to the US and global markets. 

We do not see this as a zero-sum game between Europe and the US. We still see that collaboration across borders will define the next decade, the vast majority of the companies we back become category leaders when they win in the US. While the US and China currently lead in foundation models, enormous value will be created at the application layer and through domain-specific models - where Europe has both the talent and the tools to win. And GenAI is not the first, nor will it be the last, AI wave.

Change will never be this slow again.