T-Unit, the Spotify founders' new startup, aims to defend European democracies

A bit more than a year ago, the Spotify founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon reunited, to found their first joint startup since launching the Swedish music streamer around two decades earlier: T-Unit, a company based in Stockholm, aiming to make European democracy resilient.

Since then T-Unit has built an AI-powered platform, to help decision-makers quickly understand a situation, anticipate what comes next, and decide how to act. T-Unit's solution brings together critical information that normally would be scattered across authorities, companies and systems.

The young company is led by former Swedish army officer, and former VP Security at Vattenfall and ABB, Fredrik Torp. Currently, T-Unit only caters to its home market, but plans to expand across the Nordics, the Baltics, and key European markets.

So far, the founders have financed T-Unit themselves, with reportedly at least around €5M ($5.5M) in funding. Today the company announced its first external investor: European VC firm Lakestar, which takes the lion's share (or possibly the entirety) in a new €50M funding round.

Lakestar founder Klaus Hommels and Spotify’s founders go way back. Hommels invested personally in Spotify in 2008, before participating in its $100M Series E round in 2012 through Lakestar.

According to Dagens industri, T-Unit was valued at SEK3.5B (around €320M) in this new funding.