The co-founders of Einride, the Swedish autonomous electric trucking company that went public on Nasdaq in June, unveiled a new venture platform at TechBBQ in Copenhagen on August 26 that is structured not as a conventional fund but as an operating company — one explicitly designed to address a gap that industry research has repeatedly documented as the primary reason European deep tech companies fail to scale: the near-absence of operators who have actually built and run deep tech companies among those writing the investment checks.

The firm, called Navisalma, was founded by Robert Falck, Linnéa Kornehed Falck, and Robert Westerdahl. Falck — who spent nearly a decade as Einride's founding CEO before transitioning to executive chairman in May 2025 — serves as Navisalma's CEO. Kornehed Falck, who served as Einride's Deputy CEO and Chief Marketing Officer and led its design organization, is a founding partner. Westerdahl, who co-founded Material Economics — the Stockholm-based industrial sustainability consultancy that McKinsey acquired in 2021 — and subsequently became a McKinsey partner, is the third founding partner.

Research from the 2026 European Deep Tech Investor Report, published by The Big Search and Dealroom, found that only 27.3% are former deep tech founders among European deep tech investors. The same analysis identified operator-investors — those with firsthand experience building and running the category of company they fund — as having a measurable edge in deep tech, where execution risk rather than idea risk is the primary failure mode. Navisalma's founding team consists entirely of operators: Falck oversaw the manufacturing, commercialization, and regulatory clearance of cab-less autonomous freight vehicles across five countries; Kornehed Falck built a design organization recognized by external clients before it was spun out; Westerdahl scaled a consultancy into an acquisition by one of the world's largest professional services firms.

What Navisalma Is — and What It Is Not

Navisalma describes itself as a platform rather than a fund — a distinction that matters structurally. A conventional VC fund sources deals externally, writes checks, and takes board seats. Navisalma is configured more like a venture studio: it co-founds or closely co-creates companies, embeds operational expertise directly in its portfolio, and retains equity not as a passive financial investor but as an institutional co-founder. The venture studio three-role model — combining entrepreneur, operator, and investor functions — is what distinguishes Navisalma's architecture from a traditional VC.

The firm plans to deploy 5 billion Swedish kronor (approximately $526 million USD) into European deep tech over the next three years, targeting sectors where long R&D cycles and capital intensity have historically screened out generalist funds — primarily energy systems and robotics. The initial vehicle — approximately 400 million kronor raised (approximately $42 million USD) was contributed significantly by the founders themselves and a small number of prominent Swedish entrepreneurs.

"Europe is exceptional at creating technology, but we have not been equally good at turning that technology into value," Falck said at the Navisalma launch at TechBBQ. The firm's ambition, stated explicitly, is to enable at least ten new globally competitive technology companies within a decade.

Navisalma also encompasses a separate entity: Navisalma Design, a studio co-founded by Kornehed Falck in February 2026. That studio acquired Einride's internal design organization — which had begun attracting external clients during its time inside the company — at fair market value established by an independent third-party valuation. Einride retained a minority stake in the design business and signed a three-year retainer for its brand, design, and marketing needs. Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said at the time: "We're proud of what we've built together." The design studio's clients — including Legora, Greenely, Strike, and Tandem Health — represent Navisalma Design's creative client roster; they are not VC portfolio investments of the Navisalma fund.

Why Einride's Nasdaq Journey Matters Here

Understanding Navisalma requires understanding what Einride's founders lived through to get to a Nasdaq listing. Einride, founded in 2016 by Falck, Kornehed Falck, and Filip Lilja, built cab-less, purpose-designed autonomous freight trucks that can be remotely supervised by human operators — a fundamentally different architecture from companies that retrofit existing commercial vehicles for autonomy.

The path to public markets was long and capital-intensive. Einride raised a $110 million Series B in 2021, expanded into Germany in 2022, and partnered with clients including Mars, PepsiCo, Carlsberg Sweden, DP World, and GE Appliances before Falck stepped down as CEO in May 2025 to become executive chairman, explicitly saying he wanted to focus on "long-term strategy" and positioning the company for an IPO. A SPAC merger with Legato Merger Corp. III was announced in November 2025, followed by an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE financing in February 2026 that drew participation from EQT Ventures and a West Coast asset management firm. Einride closed the Legato merger on June 9, 2026, and its American Depositary Shares began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ENRD on June 10, 2026, at a pre-money valuation of approximately $1.35 billion.

The founders who built a cab-less autonomous truck company from a 2016 founding to a $1.35 billion Nasdaq debut are now deploying their accumulated pattern recognition toward a different class of problem: not building one deep tech company, but building a platform that can repeatedly produce them.

The First Bet: Abundry's Grid Intelligence Thesis

Navisalma's inaugural investment is Abundry, a Swedish startup co-founded in 2025 by Falck, Westerdahl, Filip Lilja (also an Einride co-founder), and Anders Åhlén, an energy transition veteran who serves as Abundry's CEO.

Abundry launched publicly on June 25, 2026, at a deliberately symbolic venue: Ygne, on the Swedish island of Gotland — the landfall point for the world's first commercial high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power link, commissioned in 1954. The HVDC link was a technological milestone because it proved that electricity could be transmitted over long distances with lower losses than alternating current, enabling large-scale interconnection of power grids. Abundry's launch at Ygne signaled its founders' intent to occupy a comparable position in the intelligence layer of the energy transition.

Abundry's product is a decision intelligence layer for energy systems, combining digital twins, AI optimization algorithms, and energy-system data — sensor feeds, SCADA outputs, GIS models, asset registries — to help utilities, cities, industrial operators, and infrastructure investors plan and manage their energy infrastructure. The platform creates continuously updated virtual replicas of energy assets and grid segments, simulates future states under variable conditions, and identifies operational decisions that extract more performance from existing infrastructure without requiring new physical construction.

The engineering argument behind this is specific. As Anders Åhlén put it at launch: "The infrastructure often already exists and the grid can frequently carry more than we realize. What limits the energy transition is increasingly the ability to understand complex systems, make better decisions, and act faster as conditions change."

What Does a Digital Twin Actually Do for a Power Grid?

A grid-level digital twin is a dynamic, synchronized virtual replica of a physical power network that continuously ingests real-time data from sensors and integrates physics-based and data-driven models to mirror the operational state of the actual system. The twin can simulate how the grid responds to a new renewable connection request, a sudden load shift from an industrial user switching to flexible demand, or an unexpected generation shortfall — before any of those events occur. The result is that operators can test switching strategies, stress-test infrastructure assumptions, and plan upgrade sequences with higher confidence than traditional static models allow.

The market context makes Abundry's timing legible. Europe's electricity demand is expected to roughly double by 2040, driven by electrified transport, industrial heat, AI data centers, and distributed renewable generation — requiring an additional approximately 2,000 TWh of annual production on top of today's approximately 2,500 TWh baseline. Yet the grid infrastructure to handle that demand is demonstrably behind: approximately 170 GW of wind projects sat awaiting grid connection permits across Europe as of May 2026, a volume that would represent nearly 20% of the continent's current total electricity demand if it were operational. Meanwhile, €7.2 billion in renewable power was curtailed in seven countries in 2024 alone because the grid could not absorb it — with generators still compensated and costs passed to electricity customers.

Closing the grid investment gap through new physical infrastructure is expected to cost roughly €660 billion per year by 2030, rising to €1.2 trillion per year by 2040 in Europe alone, according to the EU's Clean Energy Investment Strategy and December 2025 Grids Package. Abundry's thesis is that a significant portion of that gap can be bridged through intelligence: if grid operators better understood their systems' real-time headroom, they could safely connect more renewable capacity and absorb more generation variability without waiting for new transmission lines.

Robert Falck framed it as a fundamental transition in how energy infrastructure is understood: "We believe the next generation of energy infrastructure will not be defined by what we build, but by how intelligently we operate what already exists. For more than a century, the energy sector focused on building physical assets. The next era will be defined by the intelligence that connects, understands, and continuously improves them."

Placed Inside a Record-Setting Context for European Deep Tech

Navisalma's launch arrives at a moment when European deep tech is simultaneously attracting record capital and struggling to distribute it usefully.

European deep tech investment reached a record $20.3 billion in 2025 — 32% of all European venture capital deployed — according to the 2026 European Deep Tech Report published by Dealroom, Lakestar, and Walden Catalyst. But conversion rates remain structurally weak: European deep tech startups progress from one funding round to the next at roughly half the rate of their US counterparts, a gap the report attributes partly to capital scarcity and partly to the limited operational experience of the investors backing them. Over 80% of exits by value are captured through M&A, with US companies as the predominant acquirers — meaning that when European deep tech succeeds, the returns typically leave the continent.

The structure of the new capital entering the market is also bifurcating in ways that Navisalma's model is specifically designed to navigate. A TechTimes analysis of European VC data found that the first half of 2026 delivered a 27% rebound in capital raised — but the number of companies actually receiving investment fell to a six-year low, with seed-stage deal counts dropping 44% year-over-year as capital concentrated into a shrinking number of late-stage mega-rounds. Generalist funds growing in size are moving minimum viable check sizes upward, leaving the earliest-stage capital gap — where deep tech companies need patient, operationally experienced partners most — increasingly unfilled.

Is the Target Achievable?

Navisalma's stated ambition — at least ten new globally competitive technology companies in a decade — is ambitious by any measure. The European venture ecosystem, for all its recent progress, has produced only a handful of technology unicorns in deep tech sectors over the past decade, and most of them are software-native or AI-adjacent rather than hardware-based. Building a robotics or energy systems company at global scale from a European base requires not only capital but manufacturing partnerships, regulatory clearance in multiple jurisdictions, and sustained commercial traction with large industrial customers — exactly the kind of execution challenge that Einride's founders spent ten years learning how to navigate.

Whether Navisalma's platform model — with its embedded design capability, energy strategy expertise, and operational network — can be systematically applied across ten different companies in ten different domains is an open question. Venture studio research suggests that studios produce Series A success rates approximately double the industry average and reduce time from concept to Series A by more than 50% compared to traditional startups — but those benchmarks are predominantly drawn from software-era studios, not from hardware and energy companies with five-to-ten-year development cycles.

What is clear is that Abundry, the first bet, is being built by co-founders who understand both the energy sector (Westerdahl's decade of industrial decarbonization work; Åhlén's energy transition background) and the demands of scaling a capital-intensive B2B technology company from zero (Falck and Lilja at Einride). That combination of domain expertise and scaling experience is precisely the credential that the 2026 European Deep Tech Investor analysis found to be structurally absent from most of the European deep tech investor base.

The long-term test of Navisalma's thesis is whether operator experience at the investment level translates into better outcomes at the portfolio level — and whether the European deep tech ecosystem can produce enough platform-model operators, backed by enough patient capital, to close the conversion-rate gap before the continent's most valuable technology assets are absorbed, once again, by acquirers based elsewhere.

Currency conversions are approximate and based on exchange rates as of August 27, 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Navisalma and how does it differ from a conventional venture capital fund?

Navisalma is a venture platform founded by the co-founders of Einride — Robert Falck, Linnéa Kornehed Falck, and Robert Westerdahl — that operates more like a venture studio than a traditional fund. Rather than sourcing external pitches and writing passive checks, Navisalma co-founds or co-creates companies directly, embedding operational expertise from its founding team into portfolio companies from early stages. The firm plans to deploy approximately 5 billion Swedish kronor (roughly $526 million USD) into European deep tech over three years, beginning with an initial vehicle of approximately 400 million kronor ($42 million USD). Its stated goal is to enable at least ten globally competitive technology companies within a decade. Only 27.3% of European deep tech investors are former deep tech founders, according to a 2026 industry report — Navisalma's three founding partners are all operators who built and scaled companies in deep tech sectors.

What is a digital twin, and how does Abundry use it for energy systems?

A digital twin for an energy system is a dynamic, synchronized virtual replica of a physical grid, asset, or infrastructure network that continuously ingests real-time sensor data and uses physics-based and AI-driven models to simulate the system's behavior. For a power grid, this means the twin can simulate how the grid responds to a new renewable connection, a sudden load shift, or a generation shortfall — before those events occur. Abundry uses digital twins combined with AI optimization algorithms and energy-system data to help utilities, cities, and industrial operators identify how much more capacity their existing infrastructure can carry, and which operational decisions extract the most performance from it. The company's thesis is that a significant portion of Europe's 170 GW wind capacity backlog reflects underutilized grid headroom — not just insufficient physical infrastructure — and that better decision intelligence can unlock that headroom without waiting for new transmission lines to be built.

Why are 170 gigawatts of European wind capacity sitting idle, and what would Abundry do about it?

As of May 2026, approximately 170 GW of wind power projects were awaiting grid connection permits across Europe — a volume that would represent nearly 20% of the continent's total electricity demand if those projects were operational. The backlog exists partly because grid operators, working with conservative static models, cannot safely approve new connections without understanding in real time how the system will respond. Abundry argues that the grid can frequently carry more capacity than these static models suggest — and that a decision intelligence layer, built on live digital twins and AI optimization, can safely unlock approvals that would otherwise sit in multi-year queues. Whether its technology can deliver that result at the scale Europe's grid transition requires remains to be proven commercially.

What happened to Einride after Robert Falck stepped down as CEO, and how does that connect to Navisalma?

Robert Falck stepped down as Einride's founding CEO in May 2025, transitioning to executive chairman with an explicit focus on the company's long-term strategy and public market path. Einride subsequently completed a SPAC merger with Legato Merger Corp. III, closing on June 9, 2026, and began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ENRD on June 10, 2026, at a pre-money valuation of approximately $1.35 billion — having raised an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE from investors including EQT Ventures in February 2026. Before and alongside that process, Kornehed Falck negotiated the spinout of Einride's design organization into a new studio, Navisalma Design, in February 2026. Navisalma, the venture platform, was publicly launched by the three founders at TechBBQ in Copenhagen on August 26, 2026 — with Falck as CEO and Kornehed Falck and Westerdahl as founding partners. The sequence represents a deliberate post-exit reinvestment of the founders' operational experience, networks, and pattern recognition into a new category of company-building platform.

Originally published on Tech Times