Twelve years financing industrial companies, then seven inside one.
Oscar Wallner spent twelve years in banking and investment at Lehman Brothers, Nomura, Swedfund and Citi. At Citi he was a corporate banker and credit officer covering Sweden's largest industrial groups and private-equity houses, with relationship and credit responsibility for about half of the bank's Swedish corporate franchise.
Since 2019 he has been at MTEK Industry, a manufacturing-operations software company, first as CFO and then as CCO. He recommended closing its robotics line in 2020 to refocus the company on software, led its move from clean-tech start-ups to aerospace, defence and automotive manufacturers, and raised c. USD 27m from investors including ABB Technology Ventures and Altra Industrial Motion.
He was an early investor in and board member of Norna, one of Sweden's first AI companies, and takes a small number of advisory mandates for investors and founders through Interstice Advisory. He writes about Nordic industry, capital and operating decisions.
MSc, Stockholm School of Economics · Swedish Amphibious Forces
What the operating years taught
Product-market fit is decided by the client; how a one-way-door purchase gets made; and the cadence between strategy, sales cycle, budget and funding.
August 2026 · OrganisationsGo and see
Every organisation's account of itself bends toward what the reporter thinks the reader wants. Four traditions — Toyota's gemba, McChrystal's shared consciousness, the shortest-path routing rule, and Nordic flatness — arrive at the same correction. And why flat is not the same as consensus.
August 2026 · CommercialYou don't know why you won
Most companies never ask their customers why they were chosen, and the ones that do ask badly. Once every vendor has cleared technical diligence, the decision stops being technical — which is the commercial case for culture, and it is not a soft one.
August 2026 · OperatingOne clock
Strategy, sales cycle, budget, funding cycle and cap table are one mechanism with a single rate. Why the value of capital is a step function, why raising less to see proof first is self-defeating in a long-cycle business, and the four numbers that diagnose it.
July 2026 · DecisionsTwo kinds of aim
A sniper computes; a fire controller converges. Two modes of decision-making learned coordinating indirect fire — and why the people best trained for precision are often the slowest to move when the problem is not a precision problem.
July 2026 · The frameThe machine that builds the machine
Manufacturing for atoms, AI for bits: the factors of production have a new mode, two grammars of risk are colliding — and when building is cheap, focus becomes expensive.
July 2026 · The thesisEurope's build decade: energy, compute, industry
The next twenty years run through one triangle — and the scarcest input is people fluent in all three corners. The thesis, at essay length.
December 2025 · Op-edThe Next Nordic Export Industry
Compute, energy, and the next generation of industrial infrastructure — the public version of the thesis, written seven months before this site.
July 2026 · Finance × AIWhat a banking P&L teaches you about AI
Credit discipline turns out to be the rarest input to serious AI systems: provenance, the ability to say no, and material sized for the reader who must decide.