Can you describe The Ground and what was the concept behind opening it? How is it different from other co-working spaces in the region?

“The Ground is a entrepreneurial community filled with hard-working, nice people who build digital products. It began because two successful entrepreneurs had sold their company, and wanted a space to sit and work on their next interesting project with other likeminded digital experts. So they bought a house and The Ground family was started.  The Ground is private and network based – all companies come in through people sitting at the ground.

What is your role at The Ground? Can you explain a little bit about yourself and the team who is running The Ground?

“I run the Ground, overseeing daily operations, managing events and the projects we have on the go here. I make sure the companies sitting at The Ground have what they need, meet with new companies and people at the ground and help with strategic planning for the future. Hampus Jakobsson looks after investors and incoming companies, as well as mentoring the companies. Really everyone who sits at The Ground is involved in running it. People host expert meetups and events, start afterwork initiatives, make house improvements, etc. themselves which we really encourage because we want people to feel like The Ground is their space. In particular, the companies are really good at supporting their counterparts (designers, developers, etc.) in other companies, bouncing ideas and mentoring each other.

What are the office and workspace options? How does it work as a co-working space, what is free, what is paid?

“Companies hire offices (own room) and have access to meeting rooms. We treat The Ground like a house, so everyone has their own room, shared kitchen and hangout spaces. You also need to take off your shoes at the door. We don’t have a co-working space, companies pay by the amount of people they are in the room, and then everything is included.

How can an individual or a business be accepted to work at The Ground?

“We find companies through our network. At the moment The Ground is full, however we are looking to expand next year and then hopefully will have space to bring in more companies.

On the website, working at the The Ground is described as being part of a family. What is the community like?

“At The Ground we always will prioritise culture above profit, selecting only people and companies who understand and want to contribute to the ‘family’ atmosphere we have here. We help each other out, we make each other coffee, there’s a lot of knowledge sharing, trading advice and ideas and mentoring which happens in our kitchen, which really is the heart of The Ground. The companies we have are all digital product focussed, a lot of experts/specialised knowledge especially around machine learning and image recognition.

Do you organise any events at The Ground?

“We host meetups, investor events and other smaller startup community events. Most of these events come through our network or are initiated by people sitting in the house.

What are your visions for the future? How do you think The Ground will look in the next couple of years?

“We’re currently expanding our building size, so we can have a dedicated event space and a few more companies in the house. Our vision is to continue building a digital expert hub in Malmö, mentoring and helping other entrepreneurs in the region.

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entrepreneurial journey

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your entrepreneurial journey?

“I studied at Lund University and got engaged with a company called Famtidsfabriken back then which was the super-startup, the Spotify of the 90s. That was my first encounter with the startup world. My first company I started in Sweden was called Instadia, a web analytics business. It was built as a service and we grew it very fast with clients such as IKEA, H&M, TELE2 and SEB, and even big media publishers like Aftonbladet. It was sold to Omniture in the United States which was later acquired by Adobe.

“After that, I had some money but not my own business idea. Instead, I found a fantastic Swedish-Persian entrepreneur who had the vision of TV going online and he created the first adserver for online video. So we were the reason people hate online media because we were the ones introducing commercials before the video clip starts in Sweden. It was called Videoplaza, and it was a very hyped startup. I stopped working there around six years ago and created Smartclip, an online video network which was mostly about sales. There we tried to convince the big media agencies to move money from their TV budgets into online video advertising. In the end it was sold to Adconion in the US.

“Already at that time I was wondering that if I could sell this much advertising, how can I increase the supply more? And that was the time when the idea of Strossle was born. This is my fourth startup that I start/co-start and execute.”

the idea behind strossle

Can you explain a bit about Strossle?

“It is service that helps connect content providers with the right audienceWhat.. What we do is the result of the four major publisher trends that I have spotted.

1. Syndication. When you have a piece of content, for instance the rights of the Olympic Games you need to work with other companies in order to get the money back for what you payed for the rights, so you syndicate it to several companies. It is the same with an article, you might have to publish your article on several platforms in order to gain the money it costed you to produce it.
2. Automation. Lots of the editorial work is very manual and you can’t do anything about it. But with Strossle, we help automate publishing.
3. Data. If you have data about people who might be interested in your articles, you can present the right article for the right person. Today, very few companies have data other than Google and Facebook, which means that the publishers have very limited data about their audience.
4. Native advertising or editorial advertising.

“Based on these trends we asked: “what can we do?” So we created algorithms that can guess what you are interested in reading. Basically, when you read an article, underneath the article there are content recommendations. Here we feed it with algorithms understanding who you are, what you are reading, what you have read before, what is trending on social media and so on. The many different algorithms try to understand what is the next thing that you as an individual would like to read. That is the core of what we do, content recommendations.”

How do you acquire the data? How can you find out what I, the reader, am interested in?

“Today we work with more than 1000 different publishers such as Prisa in Spain and Stampen, Mittmedia, Bonnier and Egmont in Sweden. So we index and analyze every single piece of content that is being published in Sweden, a bit like Google, and try to decide what is the content about. So if you read, say, 20% sports, 20% culture, 30% business and so on we can do a profiling of you. Then we apply something called machine learning on top of that to understand what would be the logical next thing that you would like to read. We want to try to give you as good recommendations as possible in order for you to click.”

future plans and ambitions

Do you plan to extend your business more to other international markets?

“We are a bit more than three years old today, with 46 people in the team and operations in ten countries. Three weeks ago we launched in Italy. I have a very aggressive plan, to launch in two or three more markets this year. Our next markets are Germany, where we start after the summer and then Poland before the end of the year. We already added Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Next year I plan to enter another 5-7 markets.”

Where do you see the company in 5 years?

“It will be a global company and the biggest in the world in our field which we call audience development. We understand that the most important thing is content and try to understand how a visitor engages and interacts with it. We want to give visitors a better media experience. Today other platforms are doing the same thing, Facebook, Google etc. But we focus on the publisher universe, where the content is created.”

How do you see the competition in the field of audience development?

“Whatever you create there are always Americans who do similar things, and it doesn’t matter what you do. There are good because they have tons of money and exceptionally good management. What they lack though is adaption and speed, and that’s where I believe we can beat them. We also have a stronger product orientation. American competitors are good at packaging but maybe not the product itself. So we concentrate on speed, production and stronger product offer because you can never beat an American competitor with money.”

Apart from keeping up competitors, what has been the biggest challenge throughout your career?

“God, there are so many! I walk around everyday with constant pain (laughing). My biggest challenge in general is international expansion, to take a clever idea that you have in a local area and try to do it globally. That’s where I put all my attention and that is by far the biggest challenge for me.”

What advice would you give to new aspiring entrepreneurs?
“Think international from day one. Have sales from day one. It doesn’t matter how good your product is if you don’t have sales so focus on that in your organisation. Have a sales manager from day one, think about sales from day one.”

insights into entrepreneurial ecosystem in Öresund region and Stockholm

Strossle has its headquarters in Stockholm with offices in the Öresund region as well, in Malmö and Copenhagen. What do the different offices focus on?

“In our headquarters in Stockholm we have sales and business development, that’s because of the ecosystem in Stockholm. In Malmö, we have more than 20 people. This is where the magic happens: engineering, the machine learning team and the algorithm development team are located here. We moved these from Stockholm to Malmö as it was super hard to get developers there. They are scarce, expensive and the competence level is not as high. So we decided to move down to Malmö to have a better-skilled workforce, more of them and with a more appropriate salary level. In this area you don’t have the big companies that suck up hundreds of people at a time. It’s very crowded in Stockholm, the competition is smaller here.”

Do you see any differences between the two startup scenes?

“Stockholm is amazing, it’s exceptional in Europe, you have so many fantastic examples of successful startups. In the Öresund region, you have several great examples, not that many in Malmö but rather in Copenhagen, but they are pretty invisible. We need to have more great startups talking about themselves in the region.”

What do you think is the reason behind the invisibility?

“It is media coverage. Even though a newspaper can have an article on their first page about Spotify, I cannot see that happening about, say, Trustpilot, a startup from Copenhagen. It’s partly because of the mentality, we see it as either Danish or Swedish, it is not a regional thing at all. There are amazing entrepreneurs in this area  but they are not so visible.”

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Barcamper is a project of dPixel, an Italian company focusing on acceleration, advising venture capital funds and helping startups to find investors. Functioning as an office on the road, Barcamper is seeking talented entrepreneurs and interesting ideas in the cultural and creative sectors, such as art, design, media and food. The unique platform holds the promise of a more relaxed and casual environment for idea-pitching than what regular business meetings offer.

Starting out the Swedish tour in Veberöd on 26 April, Barcamper is going to take altogether five stops for pitching events. After Kristiansad, Östra Kärrstorp, Malmö and Helsingborg, the tour arrives to Lund on 30th of April. Startups, small companies and entrepreneurs in the cultural and creative sectors in Southern Sweden can pitch their ideas to a panel of experts in an informal environment.

Participants have 30 minutes for a pitch to the scouting team consisting of dPixel, the Creative Plot and other experts. After the tour, the accelerator will take place at Ideon in late August. The top ten participants will be offered mentorship and coaching along with financial aid for their idea.

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Shopbox, a Copenhagen-based startup, is an all-in-one counter app, designed for quick-service stores, restaurants and arenas. Through the app, business owners can also handle webshop, inventory management and employee system among others.

Shopbox, partnering up with Microsoft and HP, now claims to have developed the world’s fastest cloud-based checkout counter, which can be a huge advantage in the hospitality industry. The Danish startup received around 300.000 EUR investment from Microsoft and other partners to develop the system for Windows 10. Klas Hammar, responsible for Windows 10 at Microsoct Sweden, emphasises that Shopbox’s innovative nature in combination with the reliability of Microsoft and HP results in a strong new solution.

The new Point-of-Sale service is mainly targeting coffee shops, clubs and sport arenas, where fast transactions are crucial for consumer satisfaction and for bigger revenues.

“We have improved the speed of checkout with at least 25% compared to other very fast solutions out there. This is huge when you have to cater a ton of people in no time. Our first customer is a large and well-known venue. They wanted to have faster transactions and we made that happen. And on top of that the other benefits of a cloud-based POS. For a startup it feels very good to be able to outperform the old guys” – says Christian Zigler, founder & CEO of Shopbox.

The collaboration is mutually beneficial for all parties. Until now, Shopbox has only been available for iOS users, but reaching Windows-users can increase its sales. For Microsoft, cooperation with HP can help in positioning themselves better at the tablet market, while making Shopbox available can attract customers who appreciate fast and reliable service.

The first country of launch is going to be Sweden where the large-scale customer has been already testing the service since January.

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Thinkubator defines itself as a facilitator of scalable positive impact, creating a space for discussion and idea exchange between corporations, startups, students and thought leaders. It is entirely crowdfunded by businesses who, in return for their donations, can benefit from fresh ideas and brain power of future entrepreneurs.

“Being a part of thinkubator was an amazing journey for Tiimo. We started with an idea and by the end, had grown that idea into a business and were testing our first prototype. thinkubator really inspired us to keep pursuing our goal and gave us a lot of the necessary tools and sparring to actually make stuff happen,” – says former participant Helene Nørlem, co-founder of Tiimo.

The selected startups will receive a grant of 2000 EUR and will be provided an office space including lunch in DARE2mansion, a co-working space in Copenhagen’s Science City Park. Throughout the ten weeks, teams will receive coaching from successful businesses. This year, mentors and speakers are coming from companies such as Upwork, Singularity University and DTU Compute & Space. Startup teams will share their knowledge and ideas as well, by taking part in case competitions four times during the program. Warming up to the accelerator program, selected teams are also invited to attend a five-day innovation training organised by Danske Ideer, a competition for young students and entrepreneurs working in design and technology, between 29 March and 2nd April.

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Combining digital technology with the expertise of healthcare professionals, Monsenso developed an innovative solution to help individuals tackle the burden of mental health. Monsenso provides an easy-to-use communication channel between healthcare providers and their patients which can make clinical treatment more efficient. Healthcare professionals use the cloud-based „mHealth” service to monitor patients, check warning signs and offer treatment. The patients, after self-assessing their symptoms on the smartphone app, receive regular feedback from their healthcare provider. The historical health and behavioural data collected from individuals can be analysed to predict illness development and mood forecasting.

The E-mental project has recently been granted a total of 19 million DKK (2,5 million EUR). It is a collaborative project of The Mental Health Services in the Region of Southern Denmark (MHS), the South Denmark University, Aalborg University, Context Consulting and Monsenso.

Monsenso is going to be involved in the Anxiety Monitoring Study and the mDIARY Study of the project. The Anxiety Monitoring Study aims to evaluate and  implement the mHealth solution to help treat anxiety disorders. The objective of the mDIARY Study is to prove that the Monsenso DBT solution is a valid method for collecting patient data and can serve as an efficient solution to help patients’ recovery. In addition, the study will continue with a pilot study comparing the results of patients using a paper-based diary and patients using the mHealth app, as well as a two-year trial comparing the effects of using the mHealth app including coaching suggestions and using paper-based self-assessments. The overall research will also include a cost-effectiveness study to evaluate the mHealth solution.

“The mHealth solution developed by Monsenso has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric illnesses. The support received from the Innovation Fund will provide us with the necessary evidence to validate our solution clinically and financially for the treatment of mental illnesses.” – says  Thomas Lethenborg, CEO at Monsenso.

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The startup was launched in the beginning of 2015 and had stable growth throughout the year with around 150 000 app downloads from the Appstore. Tradono’s most active marketplaces are naturally the most populated Danish cities like Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense but many smaller towns are present on the site as well. Mads Aarøe Mathiesen, co-founder of Tradono says the site is ready to be introduced abroad, with the next market being probably somewhere in Europe.

Besides exploring new markets, the team will continue to focus on improving the user experience of the site to encourage more secondhand shopping.

“Every time we facilitate a deal that would not have happened otherwise, we make two people happier, and our consumption will be headed towards a more sustainable direction. In 2016 we will have many more unused stuff out of hiding.” says Mads Aarøe Mathiesen.

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Franzén founded Owegoo in 2013. The travel site stands out from the regular booking sites by focusing on what people want to do on a vacation instead of the location itself. By searching for different activities they would like to do on their trips, the site recommends possible locations. The rest of the travel planning process, such as booking accommodation and flights can also be managed through the service.

Even though Franzén resigns as CEO, she still remains board member of Owegoo. It is yet to be announced who takes over as CEO after the founder of the company.

“It is difficult to leave a company that one is passionate about, but i think it will be better for both me and Owegoo. In the last six months, I wondered whether I want to run a startup or not. I still think a lot about Owegoo, however I feel my talents are better suited at Drivhuset.” – explained Sofia Franzén to 8tillse.

The new CEO believes that Drivhuset plays an important role in the startup ecosystem of Malmö. The organisation provides education and a meeting place for young entrepreneurs-to-be. It is part of Drivhuset Sverige, an umbrella organization that has fourteen member organizations across the country. So far, the Malmö-based organization has helped over 1 000 new businesses to launch and held almost 4 000 coaching events.

“I can’t wait to see others realize their dreams and ideas. When I was offered this job, it felt just right.” – said Franzén to 8tillse.

Franzén has been deeply involved in the startup community of Malmö. Besides having founded her own startup, she is a board member of Malmö Startups and Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden, runs a weekly podcast about entrepreneurship and founded Women Founders Breakfast.

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Retail businesses in central Lund selling consumer durables, such as consumer electronics or clothes, have been going through a tough time in the past couple of years. While sales of grocery shops as well as cafés and restaurants has increased, durable goods dropped 1.5% between 2010 and 2014, according to Sydvenskan.

Luckan (meaning „the door” in Swedish) is an app that was created to help businesses in the center reach more customers. The concept was developed by Victor Sandberg, who is studying Industrial Engineering at Lund University, and five fellow Lund students. Victor conducted interviews with retailers in Lund, Lomma and Limhamn as part of his thesis project. The interviews showed that shopkeepers recognize the importance of having an online presence but they struggle with making it happen. Therefore, the students decided to develop a comprehensive app to spread information about businesses in central Lund. The app is expected to be launched before Christmas.

„We target shops that only have physical presence and therefore do not have any kind of e-commerce. We are not targetting businesses of the size of H&M and the like.” – said Victor Sandberg to Sydsvenskan.

Victor points out the importance of having a digital presence even for small retailers. Research suggests that even though online shopping has been declining, checking out the products before shopping is still  important for consumers.

Retailers can join the app for free, share updates and show what has been going on in their shops. They can also add more features for extra cost. Consumers can personalise the app so that it only shows retailers and products that they are interested in. So far, around fifty shops have expressed interest in joining the app.

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The company recently announced a rights issue on Stockholm stock exchange, Nasdaq. Among the investors are Martin Gren, founder of Axis, and Erik Paulsson, founder of Peabs. With the newly invested capital, Camurus is valued at 2 billion SEK (215 million EUR).

The Skane-based company has made two other agreements in recent years that could bring in even more capital to fund upcoming research projects. In 2013, Camurus signed an agreement with Novartis, the largest healthcare company to develop a drug for the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors and abnormal physical growth. In 2014, Camurus signed a partnership with Braeburn Pharmaceuticals to develop a drug against opioid dependence. If the candidate products turn out to be working, Camurus is estimated to gain more than 7 billion SEK (750 million EUR) in payments from these collaborations.

Our dedicated research and development efforts along with new discoveries have resulted in the innovative product candidates in our pipeline. Products that are now advancing towards the market that may fundamentally change and improve treatments for millions of patients worldwide suffering from severe and chronic disease such as opioid dependence, pain, cancer, acromegaly, and neuroendocrine tumours. – says Fredrik Tiberg, CEO of Camurus.

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