The 24 coolest tech startups in Scandinavia

Bungalo is an Icelandic accommodation service that focuses on providing cottages through local families who can help visitors explore the area and culture. It offers a more personal B&B-style experience. It was founded in 2010 and last year expanded to launch in the Canadian market. CEO Haukur Gudjonsson leads a team of seven staff.

Blendin, founded in 2013, secured $100,000 of seed funding in April 2014. It's a new social networking app from Iceland that aims to connects friends who are going out. It pools together information for popular night spots and connects friendship groups all together so that everyone knows the evening plans instead of having to call or message people on WhatsApp, for example. It was nominated for the Nordic Startup Awards last year.

Founded in 2009, Norway's Stay.com is a tool for building personalised itineraries and guidebooks for holidays.

Users can put together their own map and plans and then access them on their mobile — or make use of the thousands of public itineraries already created by the community. It is not known how much funding Stay has taken to date.

Cokonnect was founded in 2012 in Iceland and is describes itself as a real-time, cloud-based tally counter. It's a clicker counter, guest list and footfall analysis monitor for bars, nightclubs, and other venues. Cokonnect uses Google Analytics, and means that venues don't have to resort to paper guest lists or count entry numbers by hand. It received a $115,000 grant in December 2013 and before that, $100,000 from an angel investor.

Meniga is an Icelandic startup that provides financial software for European banks and financial institutions. It was founded in 2009, and received $6.5 million in Series A funding in 2013.

It helps banks and finance companies to compile raw data and information. Its aim is to help them improve online and mobile customer experience, as well as ads and marketing.

Norway has a thriving Education technology scene — more than 40 million people worldwide use Norwegian EdTech products, according to Arctic Startup.

One particularly prominent Norwegian education tech startup is Kahoot!, an in-class tool that lets users create games and quizzes. Students can compete to answer them using tablets and smartphones. In October 2014, it announced it was adding 900,000 new unique players a week.

With Danish startup Issuu, anyone can curate and publish their own online newspapers and magazines.

Since its 2007 launch, its grown to have more than 85 million monthly readers, and has worked with Vice and the New York Times. It’s raised a total of $21.5 million in VC funding.

iZettle is a Swedish company making waves throughout Europe and in the US. It produces a mobile app and card reader that allows businesses to accept payments on their phone and tablet, just like Square does in the US. But one thing that iZettle does different is supporting chip and pin - an extra security measure that hasn't been rolled out in the US yet.

iZettle has bought in investment from some well-respected VC firms. Its most recent round of funding came in May 2014 and saw it raise $55.5 million.

"Beacons" are, their proponents say, the future of advertising — and Norwegian startup Unacast is one of the most exciting companies in the space. Beacons mean that users with a retailers’ app on their phone receive notifications as they move around a store: With Unacast, this data is then transferred online, so shoppers may see ads for products they were looking at weeks down the line.

The team behind Unacast were also responsible for Aspiro — Norway’s incredibly successful music streaming app. BI Intelligence forecasts there will be 4.5 million beacons active in the US by 2018.

Orphazyme may not be one of Denmark’s most recognisable startups — but it’s definitely one of its most exciting.

The 6-year old biotech startup develops innovative treatments for life-threatening genetic disorders, and is making serious cash in the process. In January of this year it pulled in a $24 million Series B funding round, on top of a previous 2011 Series A round ($20 million).

As TechCrunch notes, the fact that sea freight sees “300 million transactions per-year and over $150 billion in turnover” makes it a “great candidate for disruption.” And that’s exactly what Xeneta is trying to do

It’s a sign of the Norwegian economy’s focus on heavy-industry that one of their most exciting tech startups isn’t a social network or a dating app, but a price comparison tool for sea freight.

In 2013, Veneta raised a $1.6 million seed round to fund operations. It now has users on six continents.

Vivino wants to make sure you “never pick another bad wine.” The mobile app aims to achieve this by building a huge user-submitted database of wines, offering reviews, average prices and ratings for almost 6,000,000 wines.

It was launched in 2010 in Copenhagen by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard; today, the company has 80 employees not just in Denmark but also in San Francisco, Ukraine and India. In July 2013 it raised $10.3 million in VC funding.

Cabforce, from Finland, has just been boosted by a $1.7 million round of funding and is "on a mission to make the door-to-door travel experience agony free," it explains. The startup offers fixed price quotes for taxi and private hire services across Europe. Don't be fooled, though — it's not Finnish Uber. Instead, it allows people to book taxis in other countries ahead of their trip aboard through an online, secure payment system.

Winner of CES’s Best Startup award in 2014, Denmark's Airtame is a crowdfunded streaming dongle that lets you easily and wirelessly broadcast from your computer to any screen or projector with a HDMI port. It launched on Indiegogo asking for $160,000, but breezed past the target, closing with more than $1.5 million in January 2014.

It hasn’t been clear sailing: Backers responded angrily after the device failed to ship when planned back in October 2014. Investors poured another $1.4 million into the startup earlier this month, however, and 3,000 of the 15,000 Indiegogo orders have been shipped, according to a TechCrunch report. The company now has 17 full-time employees.

Danish startup Fitbay is a fashion-driven social network that aims to "find you clothes that fit.” It does this by matching you with other people that are your body type. You can see what they’re wearing and follow people that match you, and grow your own following in turn.

Founded by 6’2” Copenhagenite Christian Wylonis in 2014, it has tens of thousands of users and raised $2 million in VC funding in June 2014, Fortune reported at the time. It also has an office in New York.

Supercell, founded in Finland in 2010, was formed by some of the gaming world's most experienced faces who have collectively developed more than 165 games across 12 platforms. You probably know the company from its biggest hit, Clash of Clans.

Today, CEO Ilkka Paananen is in charge of 150 staff members. The company has received over $140 million in funding, and was acquired by SoftBank in 2013.

Iceland's CCP Games is probably most famous for Eve Online, a multiplayer role playing game. CCP Games was founded way back in 1997 but is notable because it's still going strong. It creates interactive, multiplayer games that are, it says, "virtual realities." The startup's most recent funding was for $20 million in August 2012 and it has around 500 employees.

Europe loves its streaming sites, and SoundCloud is in the forefront of that. Started in Sweden in 2007, SoundCloud has become the go-to place for DJs and musicians to share their latest music. SoundCloud has moved its head office to Berlin, and currently has around 200 employees. It has embarked upon an ambitious plan to monetise, introducing premium accounts and deals with major record labels.

There were reports in May that Twitter and SoundCloud were in talks about a possible acquisition to create a music feature on Twitter, but it doesn't look like those conversations ever amounted to anything.

The company has taken $123.3 million in investment funding to date.

Finland's Rovio Entertainment shot to fame after creating one of the most popular mobile games of all time, Angry Birds. If you haven't heard of it, it's the number one downloaded app of all time, according to CrunchBase. Founded in 2003 and led by Thomas Gronholm, the company has received more than $76 million in two rounds of funding since conception, and employs about 700 people around the world. It has revenues of about €156 million per year.

Norway has all but solved the problem of music piracy. In 2009, 80% of Norwegians under 30 admitted to illegally pirating music; in 2014, that plummeted to just 4%. This is in large part down to the success of music streaming platforms.

The most successful of Norway's streaming companies is WiMP (also known as Tidal), which is developed by Aspiro. Aspiro’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed: in January, it was acquired by rapper Jay Z for $56 million.

Mojang is the Swedish game development studio that's famous for its one smash hit game: Minecraft. Started by Markus "Notch" Persson in 2010, Mojang oversaw the development of Minecraft.

The easy-to-play block-building and adventure game was an instant hit, especially with children. Mojang was eventually sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in September 2014. All three cofounders left the company, and Persson is now living in a $70 million luxury mansion in Beverly Hills which he bought after outbidding Jay Z and Beyoncé.

Swedish company King is the digital studio behind some of the world's biggest casual video games. Chances are you're aware of Candy Crush, King's biggest hit. But the company isn't stopping with just one hit game. It has a vast portfolio of apps and games - and it isn't showing the growing pains that plagued Zynga, the other well-known casual games giant.

CEO Riccardo Zacconi has been in charge of King since starting the company back in 2003. He's seen King grow from a small startup to an international games giant. King's March 2014 IPO saw stock fall initially, but it's been performing well since. The company booked $2.3 billion in 2014 revenue.

Spotify, the world's biggest streaming site, is a Swedish company, and has an office in Stockholm. The streaming service was started by Daniel Ek in 2006, and now has 60 million users around the world (15 million of those are paying subscribers).

Spotify has been touted as a possible candidate for an IPO in 2015 - although it looks like it's instead focused on raising money. It was reported in January that Spotify is raising $500 million at a valuation that could top $6 billion.

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