A few weeks ago, I was at a coffee meeting in Östermalm with someone who'd just relocated from London to take a role at one of Stockholm 's newer AI startups. He'd been through the Swedish work permit process — the full thing — and the way he described it was not flattering. Weeks of forms. A reminder that no Swede could demonstrably do his job. A near-miss over a paperwork technicality that almost sent him back. He laughed about it in the end, but only just. What struck me was that he was exactly the kind of person Sweden should be rolling out the red carpet for. Instead, the system nearly tripped him at the door. The country building Europe's AI future can't let the people who would build it through the door. The boom. Sweden's AI startup wave is real and it is accelerating. In 2025 alone, Swedish AI companies raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital — more than triple the year before. Legora , an AI legal assistant born in Stockholm, is now valued at...