Sweden is among the global leaders in fostering the creation of innovation, and our journey is a great example of how innovation is supported in various ways from science to business. Our team-member’s experience spans different parts of the world, and we’ve experienced that the open mindset and the comparatively positive attitude of many people towards innovation and development builds a strong foundation that manifests also in supportive regulations that are quite unique to Sweden.
For example, in contrast to most other countries around the world, in Sweden scientists and engineers working at public institutions like universities are the sole owners of any intellectual property they develop. This reduces the barrier to start technology-centred businesses significantly as it lowers the administrative and financial burden on founders which facilitates the commercialisation of new technologies. As a result, many start-ups have emerged, and a strong support network has developed around them over the years. This has helped create an open innovation ecosystem where new ideas can thrive.
We started our journey 2018-2020 at KTH, Sweden’s largest technical university, where our co-founder Thomas Baumgarten was working as a post-doc on a project to valorise birch bark. This project was funded by the Wallenberg Wood Science Center, a centre that works to stimulate the development of new materials from trees, ultimately strengthening the Swedish industry.
After the initial Reselo Rubber material was created, Thomas got in touch with KTH Innovation. There he got unprecedented support through his business coach Gustav Notander with market research, scale-up demonstration, securing critical IP and first customer contacts. Indirectly, KTH Innovation even contributed to forming the founding members of Reselo by pointing Thomas to the Start-up Climate Action Challenge, initiated by Sting and Norrsken. That program provided a platform for sustainability enthusiasts to form teams working around different climate positive ideas, and here Josefin and Henrik joined forces with Thomas.
“It might be perceived as challenging to take the step towards starting a business together with people you had barely gotten to know – the first meeting happened online as it was during the covid-pandemic and yet we somehow realized quite quickly that our complementing experiences and skills would work really well together. The ecosystem has been very encouraging from the get-go and we have found support both externally and internally to take on small and big challenges. Giving Reselo a chance back in 2020 was one of the easier decisions for us.” says Josefin Larsson, our co-founder and CEO.
After the founders officially started Reselo in December 2020, the work to verify their business idea started. As first-time founders with no background in the rubber industry, the team had to set off on a steep learning curve. Through every competition they participated in and every call they had with an industry expert or a potential customer, their confidence in the idea of commercialising rubber from birch bark grew further. But they also realised that there was much to learn.
In 2021, they therefore joined the Sting Incubator, which had just been recognised as the world’s best startup accelerator program. During their time at Sting, they experienced a supportive community of fellow entrepreneurs and business coaches which helped tremendously in shaping different aspects of the strategy to move Reselo forward.
“It really benefited us to be able to draw on both the Sting team and the wide network of Sting companies. We were introduced to a lot of people and a big business network which has continued to open doors further along the line”, says Thomas, our co-founder and CTO
While sharing experience and knowledge are highly valuable, for us like most deep tech start-ups funding was often the main limitation to developing technology towards commercialisation. Luckily, Sweden’s public funding landscape offers ample opportunities to finance especially early-stage development, and we are immensely grateful for support from Vinnova, Energimyndigheten and Almi. This structured support system further reinforces the strength of Sweden’s innovation accelerator program landscape.
With the combined support we had outgrown our ideation phase by the end of 2022 and we were looking into how to make the idea of delivering birch bark rubber to the world reality. This step is often very challenging as you need to find your niche and provide a solution to the market while having essentially no funds to cover material supply. However, we benefited greatly from the patience and the commitment of our early customers in Sweden and the Nordics and we feel that we would not have progressed the same way if we would have been located somewhere else in the world.
Capitalising on our early customers commitment, we were then able to secure major European funding by winning a highly competitive EIC Accelerator Grant in 2023. This allowed us to develop and scale our birch bark biorefinery process and build stronger relationships with customers and partners by implementing our Reselo Rubber into different products. Now we,ve been able to launch our first outsoles in shoes on the market, and we’ve been able to prove through a concept tire that our rubber also work in tires. Both of these steps have been taken with Nordic collaborators – Skråmträsk and Nokian.
Looking back at our journey, we realized that in addition to our partners and collaborators – our success is a tribute to the Swedish innovation ecosystem as well as to the innovation-embracing Swedish society itself. Having our roots here truly allowed us to grow faster than we would have ever dreamed of, supported at every stage by a variety of actors, effective innovation programmes and funders who believe in the change we can contribute to.
