The British patent lawyer Dominic Davies launched his start-up Lightbringer’s new AI-powered patent platform at a glitzy party in Malmö’s Västra Hamnen district last week. The Local spoke to him about the journey so far.
The British patent lawyer Dominic Davies launched his start-up Lightbringer’s new AI-powered patent platform at a glitzy party in Malmö’s Västra Hamnen district last week. The Local spoke to him about the journey so far.
The British patent lawyer Dominic Davies launched his start-up Lightbringer’s new AI-powered patent platform at a glitzy party in Malmö’s Västra Hamnen district last week. The Local spoke to him about the journey so far.
Lightbringer, which uses artificial intelligence to speed up the process of companies applying for patents, is increasingly named alongside hyped Swedish AI start-ups such as Lovables, Sana Labs, and Legora in what has been dubbed “Silicon Valhalla”.
“Sweden is now red hot in terms of AI in a way that it wasn’t even a year ago,” Davies tells The Local. “All the top international investors are looking at Sweden right now as a source of strong leads for AI startups to invest in.”
Davies originally came to Sweden 15 years ago when he was hired as a patent lawyer by the Gothenburg-based dental implants company Nobel Biocare. Two years later, he made the move down south to Malmö after being hired by the Lund-based digital whiteboard company Flatfrog.
“I was told ‘don’t live in Lund, live in Malmö, that’s where the action is’. So I moved down in 2013 and I’ve been here ever since.”
He is happy overall to have made the move.
“We’ve got a beautiful place right near the beach and a really, truly excellent quality of life,” he says of his home in Lomma. “It’s not the same as living in a big city like London and there is stuff you miss from that type of lifestyle, but what’s good here is very good.”
One aspect of Swedish life he has found challenging is the expectation that couples share childcare equally and the way that the benefits system is set up to encourage that ‒ something that has not suited him and his American wife.
“The laws around parenting are arranged in a way that expects that to be the case and as a founder and CEO of a company, that is not something that works for our family dynamic, and as a result we’ve suffered a little bit,” he admitted.
“There’s also a cultural expectation that the wife should be working full time, and the husband should do just as much child support. I do my best, but it’s not always possible.”
Malmö has, however, turned out to be a good place to set himself up as a patent consultant and start-up entrepreneur. Five years after arriving in the city he left Flatfrog to start his own consultancy, Event Horizon IP. Since then he has served as interim chief executive of another startup and even co-founded a micro-cap venture capital fund.
“You can end up being sort of medium-sized fish in a small pond,” he says of the advantages of the Malmö scene. “A person starting their own law firm in a foreign country. I’d be surprised if that was even possible in Cambridge [a science startup centre in the UK], but it was definitely doable in Malmö.”
Davies’ move into the start-up world more or less happened by mistake, after he decided to set up as a consultant because he was worried that Flatfrog, which then faced financial difficulties, was about to make him redundant.
“This turned out to very much not be the case, but I was being paranoid and I said, ‘look, I’ll leave and I’ll be a consultant instead,'” he remembers.
“The key first client was the same company I had just left and then, next thing you know, board members were reaching out about different customers and I’d started to grow my client base. But I’m not going to lie, it was brutal, hard work. My first baby had just showed up and it was a rough year of worry because I didn’t know how the industry worked and I had to learn it all from first principles.”
The next step came when he was asked to serve as interim CEO for the med tech company Reccan, after their chief executive stepped down with very little notice, leaving Davies to raise funding and manage the company for eight months.
“The startup that I’d come to Malmö to join had given me a taste of what that life is all about. And I absolutely loved it,” he says of the startup world. “The more time I spent working in that space, the more obsessed with it I became. And at the same time I was meeting people who were just fantastic, interesting people – entrepreneurs, some successful, some yet to be successful.”
By the time he finished at Reccan, he says, he “really had the bug”, which was what pushed him to start his own micro-cap venture capital fund, Immetric, which he still runs.
Lightbringer was originally based at the Ideon Science Park incubator in Lund, which, Davies says helped him connect with potential investors and other start-up founders. The Skåne Capital Day, which connects start-up founders with angel investors and funds, had, he said, been important for the company.
“We had a lot of interest post-event. It was a bit of a shock, to the point where we had far more money being offered to us than we wanted to even raise. We decided to raise 8 million kronor and then it got to the point where I’d been offered something like 15 or 16, so I had to find a way of saying no to lots of people in a nice way.”
As Lightbringer grows, he expects it to focus increasingly on its offices in Stockholm, Cambridge and Silicon Valley, pointing out that all of the 4.2 million euros the company raised in December came from Stockholm-based funds.
He is now considering moving to California and he said that the jury remains out on whether he and his family will return to Sweden afterwards or perhaps move back to the UK.
“There’s a very real chance we’ll need to move to the US to launch Lightbringer US, which will happen in the next year or two. So then it becomes a question of where we come back to. The UK seems determined to shoot itself in the foot, so perhaps it will be Sweden.”