Malmö is connected to Lisbon through the Digistar project. The organisation that ensures this connection is Clusterland Sweden.

Malmö is the third biggest town in Sweden (300.000 habitants), located in the south and only 20 minutes by train to the Danish capital Copenhagen. During the past 5 years it has become one of Scandinavia’s most dynamic places for startups in ICT, mobile, biotechnology, clean-tech and design. Together with the close by University City Lund it excels in creating new innovative companies with international ambitions.

The startup scene in Malmö is dominated by the incubator MINC (www.minc.se) which started in 2003 and has fostered a number of successful startups in a relative short period of time. This has increased interest from both international VCs and huge companies like Apple (who has made 2 acquisitions during the past 3 years), Intel, Blackberry and Huawei. Besides MINC there are meeting places like Medeon that focuses on biotechnology and life science (www.medeon.se) and Media Evolution that is a meeting place for companies in the creative and media sector (www.mediaevolutioncity.se).

For early startups there are a number of possibilities:

StartUp Dojo – hosted by Foo Café (www.foocafe.org) is an initiative where entrepreneurs meet regularly and share ideas with each other to get feedback and improve.

Malmö StartUps (www.malmostartups.com) – a group that gathers new startups with the aim to get funding and knowledge to the companies.

The enterprise unit in Malmo (www.malmobusiness.com) will help those who want to establish in the Malmö area and want to get in contact with the startup community.

Invest in Skåne (www.investinskane.com) – helps companies that wants to establish themselves in Skåne and Malmö.

Besides this there is a number of local initiatives and meeting places. Malmö is regarded as one of the most innovative cities in Europe, top ranked by for instance Forbes. The vibrant city has a very multi cultural profile and the cultural life is one of Sweden’s most exiting.

Facts

– 3^rd largest city in Sweden with 300.000 habitants.

– Ranked as 3^rd most innovative city in the world by Forbes.

– Located only 20 minutes away from Copenhagen airport with direct lines to most European cities and the innovation hubs in US, Asia and the Middle East.

– Access to two of Sweden’s largest universities (Lund and Malmö) with in total over 70.000 students.

– Home to some of Sweden’s largest companies like Ericsson, Ikea, Axis, Sony Mobile, Tetra-Pak and Qlicktech.

If you want to participate in events involving these two cities, please contact either the Coordinator of Digistar or the partner in Malmö.