When Helena Saxon steps in as CEO of Kinnevik, the company’s tech strategy is buried once and for all. A new reality awaits — and some are in for a brutal wake-up call.
When Georgi Ganev, then-CEO of Kinnevik, summarized the year 2021, he wrote the following as the opening line of the quarterly report:
“During 2021, we significantly reweighted our portfolio composition toward younger, private growth companies.”
The mandate for incoming CEO Helena Saxon appears to be the exact opposite. And if you’re a company sitting in Kinnevik’s current portfolio, the future suddenly looks anything but secure.
Reading chair Cristina Stenbeck’s statement in the press release, the new direction is crystal clear:
“We will invest primarily in profitable, cash-flow-generating growth companies where growth capital is scarce and where we can build successful and sustainable businesses across generations.”
If we allow ourselves to paraphrase the somewhat dry quote, we can sum it up like this instead: things at Kinnevik are about to get stable, predictable, and a little boring.
And it’s hard to read the statement as anything other than a repudiation of Kinnevik’s strategy in recent years.
Let’s recall what happened: in recent years, Kinnevik has invested billions in precisely the kind of unprofitable companies that need enormous amounts of growth capital, that haven’t generated a single krona in cash flow, and whose sustainability — and in some cases even their temporary success — has been heavily questioned.
This is a new and inverted strategy.
The market clearly agrees with the verdict. Over the past five years, the stock has fallen by more than 80 percent. Helena Saxon’s previous employer, Investor, has doubled its value over the same period.
Other investment companies on the Stockholm stock exchange haven’t performed as well as Investor, but they haven’t done as poorly as Kinnevik either. With one exception — VNV Global — whose focus has been very similar to Kinnevik’s, with bets on unlisted tech growth companies. The fund Tin Ny Teknik, which pursued a similar strategy, has also lost 57 percent of its value over five years.
If we want to be generous to Kinnevik, we can note that it wasn’t only the execution of the strategy that was the problem — it was the timing too. They were too late to catch the big winners — Spotify, Klarna, King — and they spent too much money on inflated valuations of companies that never lived up to those predecessors.
When it comes to the new generation of AI companies, Kinnevik has put money into Tandem Health — but missed the biggest Swedish winners so far, Lovable and Legora. VNV and Tin Ny Teknik are also absent there.
The big question becomes what happens to the existing portfolio. The list of candidates that can start generating large cash flows any time soon is short. Stenbeck herself writes that they “will be very disciplined when it comes to follow-on investments” and that they will “work with our portfolio companies to maximize each company’s potential and drive positive development.”
But positive development for whom? For Kinnevik, it could just as easily mean selling off these unprofitable holdings. A couple of fintech names were already sold last year, in a deal that short-seller firm Ningi Research criticized. These companies depend heavily on follow-on investments to keep operating. And having a major shareholder that doesn’t want to participate sends a negative signal to new investors.
Selling the holdings to someone else and moving that capital into the new strategy is therefore entirely plausible. But it requires finding buyers. Unlike Kinnevik’s earlier holdings, the names on the list aren’t particularly well known. How about companies like Charm Industrial, Enveda, Nory, Solugen, or Vay? And the ones that have gotten more attention — like Stegra, Aira, and Mathem — have run into serious trouble.
If you’re a Kinnevik portfolio company, you should probably brace for a turbulent stretch ahead. One of your largest shareholders is fed up, and now they’re turning off the money tap.
Looking a year out, several of these oddly-named companies will likely have vanished from Kinnevik’s holdings. Assuming anyone else wants them by then.
This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 25th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
