What six days of debate in a medieval town on Gotland reveal about where AI conversations in Sweden are actually heading. I spent an afternoon last week trying to explain Almedalen to a colleague visiting from Seoul. She kept asking which company organizes it, who owns the stage, who approves the speakers. I had to tell her: nobody does. A public park in Visby , open to anyone who shows up with something to say. She looked at me like I'd described a system that shouldn't work. And yet it's been running since 1968. The setting. Almedalen Week is Sweden's annual gathering in Visby, on the island of Gotland, held every year in late June. It started when Olof Palme , then a government minister, gave a speech from the back of a truck in a public park. Since 1991, all eight of Sweden's parliamentary parties have taken turns speaking there, and since 1996 companies and organizations have been welcome too. There's no central organizer deciding who gets airtime. A...
A few weeks ago, I was at a coffee meeting in Östermalm with someone who'd just relocated from London to take a role at one of Stockholm's newer AI startups. He'd been through the Swedish work permit process — the full thing — and the way he described it was not flattering. Weeks of forms. A reminder that no Swede could demonstrably do his job. A near-miss over a paperwork technicality that almost sent him back. He laughed about it in the end, but only just. What struck me was that he was exactly the kind of person Sweden should be rolling out the red carpet for. Instead, the system nearly tripped him at the door.
The country building Europe's AI future can't let the people who would build it through the door.
The boom.
Sweden's AI startup wave is real and it
is accelerating. In 2025 alone, Swedish AI companies raised nearly $1 billion
in venture capital — more than triple the year before. Legora, an AI legal
assistant born in Stockholm, is now valued at $1.8 billion. Lovable, the
vibe-coding platform that launched in late 2024, hit $100 million in annual
recurring revenue within eight months and counts itself among the
fastest-growing companies in the world. Stockholm now produces more unicorns
per capita than any city outside Silicon Valley. This is not hype — it is a
documented, measurable second wave that is bigger than the one that gave us
Spotify and Klarna.
The wall.
But there is a problem that founders will
not stop talking about. Sweden is a country of ten million people. Its
engineering talent pool, excellent as it is, has a ceiling. And with companies
like Legora effectively doubling in size week over week, that ceiling is
arriving fast. Founders complain they cannot hire the people they need fast
enough, and a major roadblock is the country's immigration system. As one
founder put it: "They're not making it easy. You still have to go through
the process of ensuring that no one in Sweden can do the job — and then when
they get here, there are so many rules and regulations." There are cases
of employees who had been at companies for two years on high salaries being
refused visas and sent home over missed insurance payments and other
technicalities. The talent shortage is not theoretical. Nearly three-quarters
of Swedish companies that haven't adopted AI cite a lack of skilled staff as
the main barrier.
The other side.
The counterargument is not trivial,
and it deserves a hearing. Sweden did not accidentally build one of the world's
most trusted, stable, and high-functioning societies. That stability has costs
— and immigration policy is one of the mechanisms by which it is maintained.
The rules that founders find maddening exist, in part, to protect workers
already here, to prevent a race to the bottom on wages, and to maintain the
kind of social coherence that makes Sweden attractive to begin with. It is also
worth noting that Sweden's tech culture — its long-term thinking, low turnover,
team-first orientation — is itself becoming a draw, with some founders
reporting that Silicon Valley talent is choosing Stockholm over San Francisco.
If the ecosystem is already attractive enough to pull people in, perhaps the
system is working better than the loudest complainers suggest.
Where I land.
I think the founders are right, and I
think the counterargument, while intellectually honest, is underestimating the
speed of what is happening. The AI window is not a decade-long opportunity. The
companies forming now — the ones deciding whether to build in Stockholm or in
London or in San Francisco — are making those decisions this year. A permit
process that takes months, that expels someone earning a senior engineering
salary over a missed insurance form, is not a measured policy tradeoff. It is a
bureaucratic system designed for a slower world, applied to a sector moving at
a different pace entirely. Sweden ranks fourth globally for AI venture capital
investment. The capital is here. The founders are here. The ideas are here.
What Sweden cannot afford is to let paperwork be the reason the talent is not.
Over to you.
Sweden has already proven it can build
world-class technology companies. The question now is whether it is willing to
update the rules that govern who gets to build them alongside us. Is tightening
immigration a reasonable price for social stability — or is it a self-inflicted
handicap at the worst possible moment? I'd genuinely like to know where you
stand.
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