when the exchange we wrote about Sweden’s startup scene late last month, we said we’d revisit the Nordics this week. Well, a promise is a promise.
But after spending hours looking at YC’s Winter 2023 Demo Day releases this week, we also couldn’t help but try to connect the dots: Are Scandinavian startups making a splash at Y Combinator? Turns out not really. And that’s really interesting.
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Two: That is the number of startups in the latest batch of YC with offices in Denmark, Norway or Sweden, according to data from the accelerator itself. And yet these three countries create more than their fair share of start-ups compared to their larger European peers.
If you add the fact that rival accelerators 500 Startups and Techstars have given up their Stockholm programs, a pattern begins to emerge. Could it be that Scandinavian startups just don’t need international accelerators, thank you very much?
A numeric disconnection
That there were so few Scandinavian startups in the latest batch of YC might be coincidental. YC often insists that it invests in founders, not ideas; presumably this also implies that he doesn’t give much thought to office locations. As a result, the number of startups from a specific country can vary quite a bit from batch to batch.
