This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on December 22nd, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Over five years, more than 40 percent of the value in Tin Fonder Ny Teknik has disappeared. In the past year alone, over 2.5 billion kronor has flowed out of the heavily criticised fund. It was supposed to ride the Swedish tech miracle — and make ordinary savers rich. What went wrong?

“We want to take on that leadership jersey, help these companies to the stock market and make sure the companies stay in the Nordics.”

Carl Armfelt, one of two fund managers at newly launched Tin Fonder, gives an interview to Dagens industri in February 2019.

Together with Eric Sprinchorn, he is about to launch the company’s first fund. The duo has broken away from Swedbank Robur and its fund Ny Teknik. Now they want to do something similar: invest in smaller Nordic tech companies.

“We believe this type of company is the future,” says Sprinchorn.

Nearly seven years later, a partial accounting is in order. How did that future Swedish and Nordic tech miracle actually work out? And how well does the leadership jersey fit Tin Fonder?

The phrase “the Swedish tech miracle” had spread widely the previous year — 2018 — when journalist Kina Zeidler published a book with the same title. She interviews investors, researchers, and employees at tech companies to tell the story of “how little Sweden became the best in the world at producing global successes.”

As early as 2013, The Economist is on a similar trail, and confidence begins to grow in Sweden. For a relatively small population of Swedes, a disproportionate number of Swedish tech companies are doing extraordinarily well. There seems to be something going on.

In this environment, it is easy to understand why new funds are launched to capture this phenomenon. The successes have grown so large that even ordinary savers have taken notice. Everyone listens to music via Spotify and buys on Klarna invoices, while the kids build digital worlds in Minecraft. But not all Swedish tech companies share this positive trajectory. Far from it.

And that turns out to be a problem when you want to be a fund that takes small savers along for the ride.

To capture value growth, it helps to come in early as an owner. The company needs to be mature enough for an investor to understand what it wants to do, but not so late that investing becomes too expensive. Carl Armfelt’s comment at the start about helping companies to the stock market speaks to this. With Tin Fonder as a partner, Swedish and Nordic tech companies should be able to list on the stock exchange.

One way to be such a partner is to become an “anchor investor” — guaranteeing a certain proportion of investment and ownership before a company begins trading on the exchange. Tin Fonder does this on several occasions over the years.

In 2019, for example, they invest 10 million kronor in gaming company Moba Network, taking 39 percent of the total share issue. The company has a shaky start, but the investment is defended by Armfelt in an interview in DI shortly afterwards. He compares it to another gaming company Tin Fonder had invested in — Stillfront. In the interview, Armfelt notes that Stillfront had listed five years earlier and risen tenfold since then.

With hindsight, however, both investments are something of a minor disaster.

Moba Network has lost over 93 percent of its value since listing. Stillfront — after a gigantic peak around 2021 — has fallen 10 percent since 2016 and added a massive debt pile to its balance sheet along the way. The share price now stands at six kronor, compared with 119 kronor at its peak.

In 2021 the strategy continues and Tin Fonder Ny Teknik goes in as anchor investor in yet more companies.

The figures since each listing speak for themselves. Swedish survey company Cint Group: minus 97 percent. Identity company Checkin.com: minus 86 percent.

Even if Tin Fonder has sold off some of these failures, there are examples of dismal performance among the holdings that remain in the portfolio. Fractal Gaming listed in February 2021 alongside Tin Fonder and has since almost halved in value.

Looking at more recent times, it is not much more cheerful.

The fund’s largest holding, Surgical Science, has lost over 78 percent of its value this year. Another, Danish Novo Nordisk, has shed half its value. The Danish pharmaceutical giant is now trading at a similar price to before Ozempic and the other weight-loss products were launched.

Tin Fonder has received a great deal of criticism for delivering poor returns while charging high fees. But is it just a matter of poor management and backing the wrong shares — or are there other factors that explain the weak performance?

If you look at Swedish tech funds more broadly, you quickly get an entirely different picture.

Armfelt and Sprinchorn’s former employer, Swedbank Robur, runs the popular fund Technology. Over the past five years, Tin Fonder Ny Teknik has lost around 42 percent of its value, while Robur Technology has increased by 149 percent.

How can two actively managed tech funds based in Sweden have such dramatically different outcomes?

The answer is quickly found by looking at Robur Technology’s larger holdings. The largest is Microsoft, then Nvidia, Broadcom, Apple, and Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC. The fund is 90 percent US-based. The equivalent figure for Tin Fonder Ny Teknik is 4.6 percent in the US. The American tech giants have left behind not just Swedish tech stocks — but the entire stock market, across all categories.

A fairer comparison is therefore to look at Robur’s other tech fund, Ny Teknik — the one the Tin founders worked with before. Over five years that fund has also fallen by over 35 percent, while the Stockholm stock exchange, OMX30, has risen 45 percent over the same period.

The Swedish tech miracle has therefore not delivered particularly well on the Swedish stock exchange. And ordinary savers are starting to notice. The outflow from Tin Fonder Ny Teknik over the past twelve months stood at over 2.5 billion kronor. The strategy of betting on smaller Nordic tech companies is not working right now, at least.

At the same time as Tin Fonder launched its business, the foundations were laid for a broader misunderstanding about Swedish tech — one that persists to this day, in LinkedIn cheering sections and in Sweden’s own digitalisation strategy alike.

Namely, that Sweden should be some kind of unique unicorn factory that has created more billion-dollar-valued companies than any country except the US and Silicon Valley. That is not true today, but there may have been a brief period when we as a country held a podium position.

A more accurate picture of Swedish tech would be to say that things have gone fantastically well for quite a small number of companies. A similar pattern can also be seen globally, just on a considerably larger scale.

Individual companies achieve extraordinary success, while a great many others limp along.

But the picture is not entirely bleak for Swedish tech companies on the stock exchange. Someone who invested in Spotify five years ago has seen a 77 percent increase. Gaming company Betsson has risen a full 95 percent. Neither is in the same league as global shooting star Nvidia — up 1,330 percent — but the performance is strong.

So yes, Swedish tech can do well on the stock market. But the success is very unevenly distributed. And savers in funds that have bet on this stock market category have not seen much of it either.

Despite the dismal performance on the stock market for many Swedish tech companies, it is possible to find winners in the segment — even outside the equity market. In the pay packets of some of the fund managers, for example. During the period 2020–2024, the owners of Tin Fonder drew over 240 million kronor in share dividends.

That, if anything, is a tech miracle.