The top 1000 Nordic scaleups

The Nordics have skyrocketed into the European tech landscape in the past few years, and scaleups are the key to that growth. In partnership with Nordic Scalers and Nordic Innovation, we take our first look at Nordic Scaleups, ranking the Top 50 National Scaleups and listing the combined Top 1000 rising stars in the region. 

Scaleups are indeed growing fast

Since 2017, the Top 1000 Nordic Scaleups have grown over 5x in combined enterprise value while the rest of the region has grown 2.5x in the same period. Scaleups are a driving force within the ecosystem and together are valued at €340B. 

But value isn’t equally distributed, Sweden captures over 55% of the enterprise value in the Top 1000. Health, Semiconductors and Transportation are the leading industries, valued at €67B, €53B and €50B respectively. 

VC funding has also grown rapidly, 7.6x between 2017 and 2022, currently reaching €8.1B since January. Funding has propelled success cases, the Nordics have created more unicorns since 2020 than ever before. 

Scaleups are taking centre stage

Scaleups are the cornerstone of growth in the region. The Top 1000 Nordic scaleups concentrate 84% of total tech VC funding in the region since 2021, and all the Top 50’s lists in each country represent over 65% of total national funding. 

Impact scaleups are also consistently gaining relevance, out of 1,515 total impact startups in the region, 247 are scaleups. In 2017, scaleups represented 25% of total VC funding and 4% of enterprise value in impact, today those figures have scaled to 38% and 18%, respectively.

We see a similar picture in value creation, where in every nordic country, the combined Top 1000 scaleup enterprise value consists of over 60% of the total local tech ecosystem. 

Late-stage investment has come to the scene

Startups have been growing fast, and investors have noticed. Since 2017, late stage funding’s participation in the Nordics has risen from 28% to 55% of total VC funding in the region. 2022 has already seen €4.7B in late stage funding, while lower than record-breaking 2021 which came in at €10.8B, it is still the second highest value in history and 1.6x above pre-pandemic levels.