Tech5 Sweden: Freespee named the fastest-growing Swedish startup

Congratulations to Freespee – which turns consumer voice interactions into data – on being named Sweden’s fastest-growing startup.

Speaking about the company’s win, Freespee’s founder and CEO Carl Holmquist said:

It’s a real honour to share the stage with TNW at the conference later this month. To win Sweden Tech 5 is a great energy boost. It takes guts to think differently. Our customers, who demonstrated the courage to think differently, means everything to us. We intend to do much more in the future to ensure that they have nothing but the best from Freespee!

Adyen and TNW hosted the Swedish awards event last week at the beautiful Bar Bro bistro in Stockholm. The five finalists were Freespee, Instantor, Qwaya, Fyndiq and Cantemo.

The evening featured passionate presentations about the stories behind each of the startups’ successes and a panel discussion on the strengths and challenges of building tech companies in Sweden.

The speakers concluded that the major benefit of starting up in Sweden is the talent and drive of its people, but expressed concerns about Stockholm’s housing problems and issues around securing visas for foreign workers.

The Stockholm Tech5 event was the last of this year’s European regional finals. They began in London and continued with exciting events in Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris. The winners of each event, along with Festicket who triumphed in the wildcard voting, will now speak at The Next Web Conference next week.

Tech5’s goal is to identify Europe’s fastest growing young tech companies. Finalists were selected based on their growth rate between 2012 and 2015, using actual revenue and employee data. They had to be less than five years old, offer a scalable tech-driven product or service and have revenues of more than €200,000.

Read next: Uplike Named France’s Fastest-Growing Tech Startup