The BOARD Brief Issue 4: Stockholm is heating up

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Welcome to the fourth edition of The BOARD Brief, board-level intelligence for European private enterprise. We spend the week tracking what moved. You spend five minutes getting up to speed.

This week a Stockholm startup that launched 21 months ago doubled its valuation to $13.3 billion; an Irish infrastructure company that grew its revenue 16x since 2020 chose not to sell; and Accel committed $800 million to founders across Europe and Israel, the same amount it is deploying in the US.

Our newsletter community keeps growing. Welcome to our new subscribers from Value Bridge Partners, Nacon Studio Milan, TH Global Capital, Infinira Ventures, SKL Capital Partners, Saldo Bank and many more European investors, CEOs and Non Executive Directors.

1. Lovable has raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, doubling its valuation in eight months.

Lovable, an AI platform that lets anyone build software without coding, closed a Series C led by Menlo Ventures and co-led by the EQT Scaleup Europe Fund. Balderton, Accel, CapitalG, DST Global, Tencent and Salesforce Ventures also participated.

Victor Englesson, EQT: "They prove that Europe has no shortage of exceptional founders".

Why it matters: This is the Scaleup Europe Fund's second investment in two weeks: ICEYE last week, Lovable this week. The fund was designed to keep Europe's most ambitious technology companies headquartered on the continent. Both companies are staying where they were founded: Helsinki and Stockholm, respectively.

The "vibe coding" thesis, that AI can democratise software creation for non-engineers, now has product-market fit at scale.

Big companies are replacing off-the-shelf software and building internal tools their domain experts operate themselves. That changes the economics of enterprise software. Every board of a company spending money on SaaS tools should be asking whether their teams could build cheaper, faster alternatives themselves.

• The company launched in November 2024 and hit $500 million in ARR this June
• It hosts 60 million projects, attracting 900 million monthly visitors. Employees at nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are using it. Zendesk is building internal training tools. Handshake is replacing off-the-shelf software with tools its own teams build
• Luca Bonmassar, CTO of Checkr: "Our operations team fixed an issue in their QA workflow and can now process 10x more reports."

2. Exponent has raised €750 million through a continuation fund to extend its ownership of H&MV Engineering, valuing the Irish electrical infrastructure company at €1.4 billion.

H&MV provides high-voltage engineering and infrastructure services to data centre operators, renewable energy developers and utilities. 

H&MV's revenue has grown from €61 million in 2020 to an expected €1 billion this year, roughly 16x. The €1.4 billion valuation is a near twelvefold increase on Exponent's 2022 entry.

Rather than selling into a difficult M&A and IPO environment, Exponent created a vehicle that returns liquidity to existing investors while retaining exposure to a business it believes has further to run.

Apollo S3, Pantheon and SQ Capital, three secondary market investors, backed the transaction.

Why it matters: If your PE owner is approaching the end of a typical holding period but the exit market is not ready, a conventional sale is not the only answer.

• H&MV Engineering has a €2 billion order book and is targeting €3 billion in annual revenue within five years
• The company is opening a North American headquarters in Dallas later this year

3. Accel has raised $3.5 billion across four funds.

The Silicon Valley firm, which has backed Anthropic, Cursor and Perplexity, raised a $1.35 billion global expansion fund, $800 million for the US, $800 million for Europe and Israel, and $550 million for India.

Combined with $5 billion recently raised for later-stage investments, Accel now has more than $8.5 billion to deploy.

Harry Nelis, Accel partner based in London: "Companies raise more money, more quickly, earlier in their company life than ever before. The exciting bit is that there are massive opportunities, but the scary bit is we work with larger amounts and the risk is still pretty much the same."

Why it matters: This raise signals that Accel sees Europe and Israel as equally significant to its global strategy as the US.

The $800 million Europe and Israel fund has grown from $650 million in the previous cycle, a 23% increase. It has backed more European and Israeli-founded unicorns at Series A than any other venture capital firm, according to Dealroom.

• Across Europe and Israel, Accel has backed 200+ companies in more than 60 cities and 20 countries
• Over the past two years, Accel has expanded beyond AI applications into materials science and manufacturing, sectors where AI can transform industries that traditional software never reached

Three Swedish companies are valued at, or in talks at, more than $10 billion.

Klarna listed on the NYSE in September 2025 at a $15 billion valuation. Lovable closed its Series C this week at $13.3 billion. Legora, the Swedish legal AI startup, is in early discussions with investors at a valuation of at least $10 billion, double its $5.6 billion valuation four months ago, according to the FT.

Why it matters: A decade ago, Stockholm was known for Spotify and little else. Today it is producing a cluster of European decacorns. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz have both been in Stockholm recently eyeing investments. One Swedish investor told the FT: "There are suddenly a lot of Swedish decacorns. It is one of the hottest places in Europe right now."

Leo Yin, President of Deutsche Bank China, after the People's Bank of China appointed Deutsche as the first non-Chinese bank in Europe to clear renminbi transactions: "This establishes a direct bridge into China's financial system and strengthens our ability to support clients engaged in Europe-China trade and investment flows."
 

• Cambridge Aerospace raised $300 million at a $3.4 billion valuation. The British missile and drone interceptor startup already has MoD contracts, is in talks with the US government and is building Europe's largest solid rocket motor factory in Norfolk

• NavVis raised $85 million in a Series D led by The Jordan Company. The Munich-based TUM spin-off has scanned more than one billion square metres of industrial space for BMW, Volkswagen, Bosch and Siemens, building the spatial data layer factories need before they can deploy AI

• Vertical Aerospace secured €86.6 million in financing commitments to advance certification of Valo, its piloted four-passenger electric air taxi. The Bristol company has 1,500 pre-orders from American Airlines, Avolon and Japan Airlines across four continents

Companies are staying private longer, raising billions without ever facing public-market scrutiny. In the 1980s the average company listed after 8 years. Today it is 12. The reason is that private capital has become so abundant that companies can raise billions without going public.

For a board, is that freedom or a governance risk?

Reply to this email with your view.

Thank you for reading the fourth edition. Let us know what you think about the newsletter and what topics we should cover more.

We will be back next week.