The Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, Tillväxtverket, has granted additional funding to Swedish Scaleups. The money will create even better access to relevant investments for Scaleup companies and spread Swedish Scaleup’s methods outside the regions of Sweden where it’s operating at the moment (called ÖMS).
– I’m happy to see that our methods are considered so attractive that the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth wants to support a broader spread of them in Sweden, says Ylva Wretås, project manager for Swedish Scaleups.
Swedish Scaleups provides support for innovative scaleups with excellent growth potential. During the autumn of 2021, another eight companies entered Swedish Scaleups, and right now, another six companies are on their way in to the program. Each company that participates in Swedish Scaleup’s program starts with analyzing their current situation and potential. An extensive growth program is then implemented based on the type of challenges a fast-growing company often faces.
Skills supply, sustainability, capital, and an international perspective are crucial for growing companies.
Going from a startup phase, where the focus is often on verifying your product or service and selling it in a market, to start growing creates new challenges.
– It takes a specific type of competence to develop a product; when the company starts hiring more and more people and expands on the market, you face different kinds of challenges, says Ylva Wretås. It places new demands on the leadership and the strategic processes in the company.
Swedish Scaleups works a lot with issues around internationalization, capital supply, sustainability, and competence supply to grow in a good way.
– These are areas that often become the biggest challenges for Scaleups, says Ylva Wretås. However, we have access to extensive expertise and verified methods that we have now developed and used for seven years at Swedish Scaleups.
Ylva says that during the period 2019-2021, the Swedish Scaleup companies raised almost SEK 1.3 billion in new capital. The capital supply is an essential part of a company’s growth journey, says Ylva. This places demands on both the company’s long-term strategy and access to investments.
New investor network and dissemination of methods
With the money from the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, Swedish Scaleups will carry out a feasibility study on what a process that enables the building of a sustainable and long-term investor network relevant to Scaleups could look like. Together with an investment in a licensing model of the program and an onboarding process to systematically distribute all or parts of the program outside the regions that currently work with Swedish Scaleups.
– Our digital platform www.swedishscaleups.se contains extensiv documentation of our methods, says Ylva Wretås. This has created a demand for spreading the Scaleup program to other parts of Sweden. We are also looking into the possibility of offering the Scaleups program to more people on a national level.
Swedish Scaleups is created by investments from the EU’s regional fund via the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth and the Regions in Örebro, Västmanland, Sörmland, Uppsala, and Örebro. The work is now in its seventh year. The initiative is operated and developed by the incubators and Science Park in those regions, including Linköping Science Park.
