Einride’s Founders Start a VC Firm to Build Europe’s Next Unicorns
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Two co-founders of the Swedish scale-up Einride are launching an investment firm of their own. Robert Falck and Linnéa Kornehed Falck, together with former McKinsey partner and Material Economics co-founder Robert Westerdahl, have set up Navisalma, a platform meant to scale European frontier technology into globally leading companies, as they announced at the Copenhagen startup conference TechBBQ.
Falck is CEO, Kornehed Falck and Westerdahl are founding partners. Robert Falck and Linnéa Kornehed Falck are married.
The Thesis: Europe Has a Scaling Problem
The trio’s starting diagnosis is that Europe produces world-class research, engineering and design, yet rarely turns any of it into category leadership. “Europe is exceptional at creating technology, but we have not been equally good at turning that technology into value,” Falck says in the announcement. Rather than copying Silicon Valley, the firm wants to combine frontier tech with European strengths in engineering, design, industrial excellence and quality.
In practice, the idea is to run everything as a single platform that bundles investment, product development, design, brand building and scaling, instead of treating those as separate disciplines. Westerdahl describes the financing model as a bridge between two worlds: the frontier-tech mindset of venture capital and the scaling and value-creation logic of private equity. Kornehed Falck counts design among the core ingredients rather than the packaging: “The world’s most important technology companies are never defined by technology alone.”
€40 Million First, €450 Million as the Target
According to reports, Navisalma wants to raise around €450 million and invest it in European deep tech startups, robotics among them, over the next three years. That capital has yet to be secured. The first step is roughly €40 million, most of it said to be committed already by the founders themselves and other investors, covering operating costs and initial seed investments. No details were given on possible backers of the larger vehicle. The stated goal is ambitiously phrased: ten new global leaders in ten years.
The first portfolio company is the Swedish startup Abundry, which uses AI and decision intelligence to squeeze more performance out of existing energy infrastructure.
Carved Out of Einride
The firm’s origins lie directly inside the group. Einride sold its design organization a few months ago, with the buyer being Navisalma Design, a newly formed design studio founded by Kornehed Falck and partners. The unit covered product design, industrial design and creative work and, according to Einride, had been receiving a growing number of requests from external clients.
The deal was structured as a business transfer at fair market value based on an independent third-party valuation. Einride retains a minority stake and has signed a three-year retainer for its brand, design and marketing needs. “We’re proud of what we’ve built together,” Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said at the time of the carve-out.
Where Einride Stands Today
Founded in 2016, the company develops and operates digital, electric and autonomous freight solutions for large shippers across North America, Europe and the Middle East. In the first half of 2026, revenue came to SEK 273 million, roughly $27 million, a 26 percent increase on a constant currency basis. The bottom line showed a loss of SEK 1.12 billion, heavily shaped by one-time effects including recapitalization costs and share-based compensation tied to the listing.
The timing is notable: Einride only went public on the Nasdaq in June of this year, through a SPAC merger with Legato Merger Corp. III, at a valuation of $1.35 billion and under the tickers ENRD and ENRDW. Robert Falck, who had already handed the CEO role to Charli beforehand, serves as executive chairman there. The new venture platform is therefore starting only a short time after the market debut of the company it grew out of.
