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Top three Danish tech companies that succeeded

When it comes to tech Sweden and Finland are the usually front leaders in the north. Nokia, Ericsson, Spotify and more companies have come out of the great north. However, Denmark has also produced a fair share of the tech inventions we use today. Therefore, in collaboration with our partner Clarafinans.dk, we take a look into three of the most successful tech companies to come out of the country.

3 – ZYB (2005)

Clinching a third place spot on this list is ZYB. In august of 2005 the three entrepeneurs Morten Lund, Ole Højriis Kristensen and Tommy Ahlers decided to create an online service, that allowed users to backup their contact and calendar informations, and share them with others users easy and quick. That may sound ridiculous when looking at todays possibilities in tech, but back then it was a quite revolutionary technique. The first beta-version was rolled out in 2006 and was based on SyncML that allow wireless syncronizing, which meant that over 400 of the most used phones were able to use it. In total more than 11 million contacts were syncronized in the time it was up. In 2008 the company was sold for an unknown amount of money to Vodafone, whom relaunched the platform as 360.com. One of the founders of ZYB, Tommy Ahlers, later went on to become an angel investor in the danish rendition of Shark Tank and later the minster of Science and Education in Denmark.

2 – Just-Eat (2000)

Just-Eat was probably one of the first of its kind to base their business on fastfood restaurants. It was an online platform, where you could order food online and even had it brought out.

Man delivering Just-Eat take-away fast food in a brown paper bag.

The idea came from the Dane, Jesper Buch whom under an internship in Oslo was annoyed he did not know where to go to get a pizza. He then formed a team of friends in a basement in the Danish city of Kolding and within ten years the business was worth millions of euros. The expanded to Ireland, Great Britain, Netherlands, Norway and many other countries. The founders sold the company and made a fortune from it – but Just-eat today still remains one of the strongest global players on the market for fast food delivery. Jesper Buch did, as Tommy Ahlers from ZYB also eventually became an angel investor and still remains a part of the Shark Tank show.

1 – Skype (2003)

There is one invention to come out of the Danish tech industries is Skype – the Microsoft-owned Voice over IP communication service. It was actually made in Estonia, but the founders was a Dane called Janus Friis and a Swede called Niklas Zenström. This is by far the most valuable product to ever come out of the nordic tech scene except from Spotify. In 2005 Skype was sold to eBay for 2.6 billion dollars before Microsoft took over the amount of 8.5 billion dollars. Only the music streaming service exceeds that valuation with $30 billion.