Real change. Real impact.

Scania Ventures & New Business

Ventures and New Business is Scania’s corporate venture arm, managing a portfolio of companies and an incubator for new ideas within the Scania Group. Simon was engaged to assess one of the ventures and provide recommendations on its future direction.

Challenge

The venture was underperforming financially, and Scania wanted to understand whether to continue, reposition, or divest the business.

Approach

Together with a CTO, Simon conducted a full assessment of the venture’s financial, commercial, product, and technology landscape. The work combined due diligence with strategic evaluation, highlighting key strengths, risks, and opportunities. Based on these findings, they developed a set of actionable recommendations for the leadership team.

Impact

The conclusion was to sell and integrate the venture into another company within the Scania Group, where its technology and capabilities could better contribute to growth. Simon led the sell-side M&A process through completion and supported the integration.

Simon gave us the clarity and oversight we had been missing. That visibility allowed us to finally move from conversations to meaningful progress. It changed how we led and how we made decisions.

Therese Ahlström Brodowski

Doconomy

Doconomy is a fintech startup backed by well-known venture capital firms and leading industry players. When Simon joined as Head of Product, the company had recently raised new funding and was scaling rapidly. During this period, Doconomy was invited to participate in a highly competitive tender process with one of the world’s largest banks.

Challenge

The tender was strategically critical to the company’s growth and carried high complexity. The bank’s requirements were extensive, and the challenge was not only to position Doconomy’s services effectively but also to manage the fact that one of its shareholders was part of the proposed solution.

Approach

Simon led the negotiations from a product perspective, balancing commercial priorities with technical feasibility and partnership dynamics. Through creative problem-solving and careful judgement, he structured a proposal that aligned the interests of all parties while meeting the bank’s demanding expectations.

Impact

Doconomy won the tender against several competitors. The resulting collaboration between Doconomy, the bank, and its shareholder became one of the company’s most significant projects, validating its product strategy.

During a high-stakes negotiation, Simon played a key role in aligning our product vision with partner expectations. He helped us close one of our largest deals, balancing long-term value with tactical delivery.

Tee Pruitt

Northvolt

Northvolt set out with a bold vision: to make oil history by creating the world’s greenest battery cell. The company embarked on building large-scale manufacturing capacity across Sweden, Germany, Poland, the United States, and Canada. For the business case to succeed, reaching large-scale production quickly was critical.

Challenge

Northvolt had decided early on to develop its own Manufacturing Execution System (MES) in-house. When Simon joined as Interim Product Director for MES, it became clear that the system could not be built fast enough to meet the company’s ambitious production timelines and scaling needs.

Approach

Simon introduced a hybrid strategy combining internal development with external partnerships. He led discussions with several industry players, AWS’s manufacturing division, and a consortium led by Microsoft to identify ways to accelerate delivery and scalability while retaining ownership of core capabilities.

Impact

Although substantial progress was made with several partners, time constraints and operational pressure prevented full implementation. Northvolt later faced financial challenges and, in 2025, filed for bankruptcy; one of the largest in modern Swedish history. The MES work remains a valuable lesson in aligning digital systems with industrial scale-up.

We were juggling strategic partnerships, product development, and operational complexity. Simon brought a rare combination of system thinking and hands-on execution.

David Almström

Zettle by PayPal

PayPal acquired the Swedish fintech company iZettle for USD 2.2 billion in May 2018. Shortly after the acquisition, Simon joined to lead one of the teams responsible for identity, user, and company account management.

Challenge

A key strategic objective behind the acquisition was to integrate the two ecosystems, enabling PayPal’s online customers to use in-store Point of Sale, and giving iZettle merchants access to PayPal’s global suite of services. Achieving this required a unified account structure that worked seamlessly across all 12 markets, including the upcoming launch in the United States.

Approach

Working closely with his team at iZettle and partner teams at PayPal, Simon led the development of a user-migration strategy between the platforms. The work covered value proposition, customer communication, user testing and validation, and careful design of migration cohorts to ensure a smooth transition for millions of users.

Impact

The unified account structure was successfully launched in both Europe and the United States before Simon’s departure. This integration laid the foundation for shared products and services across the combined PayPal and iZettle ecosystem, strengthening the strategic value of the acquisition

The biggest impression I have of Simon is that when he takes on a problem, it gets solved. He helped us overcome several obstacles that held us back.

Ron Stolero

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