Stockholm
More tech unicorns per capita than anywhere outside Silicon Valley — 41 billion-dollar companies from a city of under a million, built on 1990s broadband policy and a social safety net that subsidises risk.
Stockholm produces more billion-dollar tech companies per capita than any city on Earth outside Silicon Valley — 0.8 unicorns per 100,000 inhabitants — from a metropolitan area of under a million people in a country of 10 million near the Arctic Circle.
Sweden has produced 41 unicorns. Spotify, Klarna, Skype, Minecraft, Candy Crush, King, Mojang — all trace their origins to Stockholm's ecosystem of nearly 3,000 startups and scaleups, 208 venture capital investors, and 101,000 tech employees. Microsoft paid billions for both Skype and Mojang. Spotify went public with a valuation exceeding $20 billion. Klarna reached IPO. The AI wave is accelerating the pattern: Lovable became one of the fastest-growing companies globally, Workday acquired Sana for $1.1 billion, and Legora raised capital at a $1.8 billion valuation.
Each success story created another group of millionaires who reinvest back into Sweden's technology sector — a flywheel that compounds with every exit.
The origin story is deliberate policy, not accident. In the 1990s, the Swedish government invested heavily in broadband infrastructure and introduced tax incentives for home computer purchases, making the general population technologically literate a generation before most European peers. The social infrastructure — universal healthcare, free university education, a safety net that reduces the personal cost of entrepreneurial failure — subsidises the risk-taking that venture capital rewards. Private equity investment as a share of GDP is second only to Luxembourg in the EU.
Sweden joined NATO in March 2024, ending over 200 years of military non-alignment — a phase transition as dramatic in geopolitical terms as the tech ecosystem's emergence was in economic terms. The biological parallel is adaptive radiation after a mass extinction: when Sweden's traditional industrial economy (Volvo, Ericsson, IKEA) matured, the broadband infrastructure and education system created empty ecological niches that a new generation of digital organisms rapidly filled, diversifying into payments, streaming, gaming, and AI with a speed that no central planner directed.