Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

I’ve been interviewed about Spotify and the Stockholm ecosystem by Chris Stokel-Walker in his Fact Company article How the Spotify mafia took over Sweden’s tech scene: “You got a really good mix of very ambitious, very good, mostly Swedish engineers and product people with a commercial acceleration which would have taken much longer” [without international commercial talent].

There is a growing narrative in venture right now: software is being commoditized, AI changes everything, and the real value is shifting from bits to atoms. I have written the article The Deep Tech Illusion with my thoughts on the subject on my Substack.

Alliance VC has lead the pre-seed round in Endform. The company’s official announcement, Alliance VC’s Linkedin, Tech.eu and Breakit (Swedish).

Quoting our Linkedin post:

AI is changing how software gets built. Engineers can now run multiple coding agents in parallel, generating more code per engineer. But the code still needs to be tested.

That makes testing one of the clearest bottlenecks in modern software development. More code means more tests, and manual QA does not scale. Endform addresses this challenge. It runs Playwright end-to-end tests massively in parallel, giving every test its own machine. Lovable, for example, runs over 400,000 Playwright tests per week on Endform and cut their suite runtime by more than 80%.

AI is currently breaking the historical relationship between engineering headcount and software output and software is becoming agentic. That has fundamental impact on both startup and investing strategy. I’ve written a longer article on my Substack, including how one can think about the strategic positioning of different types of software.

Lovable has announced that CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, with participation from several others, are leading the company’s $330 million Series B round.

A very impressive fundraising to close of a very impressive year.

Lovable is raising capital at $6.6 billion valuation, according to CNBC. Not yet announced, but are in the same neighborhood as rumors earlier in the fall.

Jack Altman interviews Sequoia’s new co-stewards Pat Grady and Alfred Lin. A very good episode on Sequoia (including decision making), venture investing and company building.

Also on Spotify.

Forbes ha published its annual ranking of European venture capitalists. The only Nordic-based investor in the top 25 is Johan Brenner at Creandum.

A VC: Reserves, Recycling, Returns. “You cannot produce a top decile fund with just reserves and recycling. You need to be working with great founders and teams who are building breakout companies. Just like a poker player needs to get dealt some great hands. But how you play those hands when you are dealt them is also critically important.”

Good read as so often by Fred Wilson (and yes, it’s a year-old post).

Colossus: The Last Human Edge. Profile of Henry Ellenbogen who, successfully, has invested and invests in both in public and private companies.

Carta Fund Economics Report 2025. “Leveraging data from some 2,000 private funds that rely on Carta for fund administration, this report offers a look under the hood at many of the key financial and operational details that are critical to raising, managing, and investing in private funds.”

Atomico: State of European Tech 25. The annual report on technology startups and financing in Europe.

Dagens Industri: AI-miljardärens om rekordaffären: “Jag blev faktiskt lite förvånad.” Dagens Industri interviews Sana founder and CEO Joel Hellermark. (in Swedish)

Bloomberg: Meta’s Zuckerberg Plans Deep Cuts for Metaverse Efforts. “Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 30% for the metaverse group next year, which includes the virtual worlds product Meta Horizon Worlds and its Quest virtual reality unit, according to people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named while discussing private company plans.”

Economist: Stockholm is Europe’s new capital of capital. “Yet for companies that want fresh capital without venturing across the Atlantic, Stockholm is the place to be. Bosses of unlisted businesses might visit the headquarters of eqt, the sole European private-equity firm to hold a candle to America’s giants. In the five years to the end of 2024 it raised funds worth $113bn, an amount beaten only by kkr in America. Companies looking to tap public markets, meanwhile, can head to the shiny new offices of Europe’s hottest stock exchange. Initial public offerings on Nasdaq Stockholm have so far this year raised over €6bn ($6.8bn), multiples of the equivalent figures for other bourses.”