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Startups & Venture·August 26, 2026·1 min read

From the Spotify Mafia to the Lovable Mafia: inside Stockholm’s founder network

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A $400M round at a $13.3B valuation in eight months for Lovable — alongside Legora and Neko Health — shows Stockholm’s operator network is compounding into a real capital and talent flywheel. If you’re building in Europe, treat Stockholm as a primary hub for senior hires, co-investors, and second offices, not a peripheral scene.

Startups & Venture

Deep Cogito, which develops open-weight models and helps companies build their own specialized AI models, raised a $43M Series A led by TQ Ventures

A $43M Series A for open-weight, company-specific models is more evidence that "own your weights" is becoming a serious enterprise strategy, not just an open-source talking point. If you’re heavily tied to closed APIs, at least scope what workloads would benefit from controllable, in-house models over the next 12–24 months.