Uppsala is one of Swedens fastest growing cities, as the 4th biggest in the country despite a population of only around 200,000 it has been somewhat of a “unicorn founder” factory over the past decade. Entrepreneurs from multi billion dollar success cases in tech such as MySQL, Skype, Klarna, Avito, OnGame all grew up, studied or met in Uppsala. Quite possibly the city can claim it produces one of the highest per capita number of unicorn founders in the world.
Uppsala has historically been very well known globally for its thriving life science sectors, but in recent years as technology eats the world, these worlds have been merging and biotech, medtech, pharmatech, etc has been an increasing focus for the city and its industrial life science actors.
However on the more core “tech” side, in recent years Uppsala has been growing its community steadily with more events (UPPSTART was originally started in a music bar in Uppsala in 2014), and co-working centres in Uppsala such as BASE10 are now providing a physical platform for all its talented tech-minded people.
Uppsala City has been a long standing partner to UPPSTART and its startups were given free access this year to our platform via our partnership.