Nasdaq First North Growth Market is celebrating its 20-year anniversary by crossing a monumental operational milestone: Video game developer and publisher Paradox Interactive has officially transitioned to the Nasdaq Stockholm Main Market, making it the 150th company to successfully “graduate” from the growth market platform.
The twin milestones highlight two decades of First North functioning as Europe’s premier capital engine for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and showcase how the platform’s “stepping-stone” model supports ambitious growth companies seeking to transition to the regulated market.
Two Decades of Scaling Capital
Launched in 2006, First North has undergone a significant transformation. In its inaugural year, the market hosted fewer than 50 companies with a combined market capitalization under EUR 5 billion. Today, the market features more than 400 active companies with a total market cap exceeding EUR 25 billion. Looking at new listings over the past decade, First North Growth Market has surpassed other SME segments in Europe to become the leading platform for SMEs seeking access to the public equity market.
Over its 20-year span, First North has supported the listing of over 800 companies (including 561 IPOs), helping early-stage enterprises raise a combined total of over EUR 32 billion.
The market performance data also reveals a notable shift in liquidity, corporate maturity, and institutional backing. Trading interest has risen sharply, with average daily turnover increasing from EUR 13 million in 2008 to EUR 63 million in 2025. Retail investors have become a vital pillar of the ecosystem, with their share of trading expanding from 15% at inception to more than 40% today.
According to Adam Kostyál, President of Nasdaq Stockholm, this sits alongside a broader institutional acceptance, with more sizable listings and larger institutional managers now actively utilizing the growth platform.
“Through the First North market, we’ve made accessible a relevant equity market and also a relevant debt market in a more accessible way for growth companies,” Kostyál said. “Exchange should not only be about mature capital. Making the public markets accessible for small and medium-sized companies is equally important as making the markets accessible for large ones.”
Strategic Architecture for Growth
First North’s regulatory framework allows Nasdaq to offer adapted compliance and reporting structures uniquely tailored to smaller and mid-sized enterprises.
“The role of the exchange is to reflect risk capital for companies in different stages and different sectors,” said Kostyál. “What we’ve been able to create here in the Nordics around First North has become fundamental in terms of the stepping-stone mechanism… making the exchange relevant and accessible for those companies.”
This adapted framework is engineered not to lower qualitative benchmarks, but to lower the technical barriers to entry for businesses that haven’t yet reached the scale required by larger global funds.
“We don’t want any company to list. We want the right company to list,” Kostyál emphasized. “But the definition of ‘right’ is not necessarily only large companies that meet the requirements and interests of large institutional capital.”
The Graduate Effect and Symmetric Tech
The ultimate validation of First North’s structure is its transition rate, with nearly 20% of all listed companies successfully up-listing to the Main Market. When these 150 companies first debuted on First North, they represented a combined market cap of EUR 14.7 21.9 billion. By the time they transitioned to the Main Market, their total value had increased by approximately 237% 134% to EUR 49.5 51.4 billion.
One of First North’s most powerful structural advantages, according to Kostyál, is its direct backend integration with Nasdaq’s primary infrastructure. First North is built natively on the exact same trading infrastructure, interfaces, and APIs as the Main Market.
This backend integration serves a vital dual purpose, as highlighted by Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive. It eliminates technical friction for investors, and it allows listed companies to transfer to the regulated market with minimal operational disruption.
Paradox Interactive: The 150th Milestone
Few companies exemplify this growth market journey quite like Paradox Interactive. Famous for global strategy franchises such as Crusader Kings and Cities: Skylines, Paradox was previously the largest company on First North, spending 10 years on the First North Premier segment after listing in 2016.
“We were kind of inexperienced in working with the capital markets,” Wester said. “To start with a place that has a bit lower regulatory threshold was the perfect place for us to start, while still getting the visibility you get on the big stock exchange. It felt like a cultural fit… smaller companies with the ambition to grow into big companies.”
For Wester, who has guided Paradox for 23 years from a 7-person studio to an international gaming powerhouse, the transition to the Main Market serves as both an emotional and commercial milestone.
“It’s one of those moments where you kind of stop, look back, and see, ‘Oh my God, we did all this in 23 years of business,'” Wester said. “This is a big signal, obviously, to the employees of Paradox that we’re a proper business today. It validates who we are and what we do in a way that hasn’t been done before — it’s a stamp of approval on the whole business.”
The Next 20 Years of Growth Capital
A listing on First North often initiates a dynamic shift in a company’s underlying shareholder base. The platform acts as an educational and operational runway where management teams learn the nuances of public disclosures and investor relations before executing their transition to the Main Market which may remove any platform-based investment restrictions that domestic or foreign funds might face.
“We want to make sure companies do not have any reason for investors to say ‘no’ to them based on which platform they are on,” Kostyál noted.
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