Swedish business software scale-up Fortnox is committing €4.5 million (50 million kronor) to a ten-year research initiative by the Stockholm School of Economics aimed at answering a deceptively simple question: what actually makes a company successful?
Fortnox CEO Tommy Eklund says: “We want to find out what really drives companies of all sizes to contribute to a prosperous Swedish society – from the small hair salon in Växjö and the medium-sized construction company in Gothenburg to the accounting firm in Stockholm. Collaborating with a world-class institution like the Stockholm School of Economics is the right way to get there.”
The Växjö-based company, founded in 2001, has grown from a Swedish accounting software business into a major cloud-based platform serving SMBs and accounting firms. Its products cover areas including bookkeeping, invoicing, payroll and financial administration, giving the company a close-up view of how businesses measure their progress and make everyday operational decisions.
Fortnox is also backed by EQT, the major European investment group that took the company private in 2025, further linking its growth story to Europe’s wider tech and scale-up ecosystem.
Now, the company is putting some of its resources towards understanding whether the metrics businesses rely on actually tell them what they think they do.
Through a new ten-year agreement with the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Fortnox will contribute €4.5 million to establish the Center for Responsible Performance Measurement and support a new professorship.
The initiative will investigate how businesses and other organisations define, measure and pursue success, as well as what may be overlooked when management becomes heavily focused on goals, KPIs and other performance measurements.
For startups in particular, the question is far from academic. Founders are routinely encouraged to track growth, revenue, retention, acquisition costs, margins and a growing collection of sector-specific KPIs.
Those numbers can determine where capital is spent, which products are developed, which teams receive additional resources and, ultimately, how investors and executives decide whether a company is moving in the right direction.
Yet measuring a business can also influence the behaviour of the people running it. When certain targets become central to decision-making, organisations can end up prioritising what is easiest to quantify rather than what necessarily creates sustainable value.
The new research centre will examine these dynamics and seek to develop a deeper understanding of how organisations can measure performance responsibly. According to SSE, Fortnox’s long-term financial commitment will make it possible to establish a research environment dedicated to the subject while maintaining the academic freedom of the school.
Vice-Chancellor Lars Strannegård said: “We are very grateful for Fortnox’s generous support and for the trust they place in the Stockholm School of Economics. The support makes it possible for us to build long-term knowledge in an important area. Together we can increase understanding of how organizations can measure success.”
For Fortnox, the research is also closely linked to the businesses using its software. Having built its platform around the financial and administrative needs of Swedish companies, the firm says it wants to better understand the factors that allow businesses of different sizes to contribute to the wider economy.
Results from the centre will be made publicly available, potentially giving founders, executives and investors new ways to think about the metrics they use to define progress and performance.
Fortnox also plans to apply insights from the research to the development of tools for its customers, creating a link between the academic work and the businesses using its platform.
And for Europe’s startup ecosystem, where growth dashboards and KPI reports can have an outsized influence on everything from fundraising to hiring, the answers could prove particularly useful.
Source: EU-Startups
