The transition toward a sustainable energy grid isn’t just about windmills and solar farms; it’s about what happens inside the four walls of our homes. Leading that domestic revolution is Hampus Oxenborg, CEO and Co-founder of Pytronic.

Through their flagship system, Homecore, Hampus and his team are turning houses into active, intelligent participants in the energy market.

We sat down with Hampus to discuss his journey from a self-taught teenage consultant to a serial entrepreneur.

• Hi Hampus, thank you for agreeing to do the interview. Could you please tell us how you first got involved with the startup ecosystem?

I was born blind. My parents made one thing clear from the start: that was never going to be an excuse.

When other ten-year-olds started playing Counter-Strike, I found myself drawn to something else: understanding how computers actually worked. Coding became my way in.

By fifteen, when my classmates were getting their first summer jobs, it was natural for me to create my own. I started consulting in IT security. Not because I had to, but because waiting for someone to hand me an opportunity wasn’t how I was raised.

That mindset never left. I’ve always moved toward problems that others walk past — and at some point, the gap I kept seeing in residential energy management became impossible to ignore.

• You’re the CEO & Co-founder of Pytronic, which developed Homecore, a local-first Home Energy Management System designed to help households reduce energy costs, manage peak power demand, and comply with upcoming energy regulations. Tell us more about your mission.

Most homeowners have no idea why their electricity bill varies or that they’re paying far more than necessary during certain hours. They’ve never asked for an energy management system, just like nobody asked for an iPhone in 2006.
They didn’t know they needed it.

Homecore gives households real control over energy costs, peak power demand, and upcoming regulatory requirements, without requiring any technical expertise.

The deeper mission is bigger: homes across Europe are becoming active participants in the energy grid. Homecore can be the operating system for that transition at the household level.

• You’re also a Founder at Interaktiva Fastigheter, a small specialist consulting firm with cutting-edge expertise in connected and energy-efficient properties. Could you tell us more about that?

Interaktiva Fastigheter works with house manufacturers selling pre-programmed smart homes. Early on, we noticed a clear gap in the market: on one side, there were simple lighting control systems, on the other, there were high-end systems like Control4 and Crestron costing hundreds of thousands of crowns that could integrate virtually any technology. Nothing meaningful existed in between.

That gap is what led us to start Pytronic in 2018. After several thousand engineering hours building smart home integrations, we realised that the knowledge we’d accumulated in controlling different device types — lighting, heating, ventilation, appliances — could be redirected toward something more valuable.

We weren’t just building convenience. We were sitting on the foundation for the world’s best residential energy management system. That’s when everything shifted.

• As a serial entrepreneur, what is it about the startup world that particularly attracts you? What’s the most important advice you would share with Leapfunder founders?

What attracts me is the direct relationship between the quality of your thinking and the outcome you get. In a large organisation, you can survive on process and politics for years. In a startup, reality catches up with you fast. I find that clarifying.

Three pieces of advice: fall in love with the problem, not your solution. The speed at which you learn is your most important early competitive advantage, not your technology or your funding. And be brutally honest about what you don’t know; the people worth having around all prefer honest uncertainty over polished overconfidence.

• Tell us about the startup ecosystem in Stockholm. What are the opportunities and the challenges the ecosystem faces? What do you predict for the near future?

Stockholm punches well above its weight. Spotify, Klarna, King, iZettle, Mojang — more billion-dollar companies per capita than almost any city outside Silicon Valley. There’s a culture of pragmatic problem-solving and building globally from day one that creates genuinely strong founders.

The challenges are real. The gap between proof of concept and scale is where Stockholm struggles most. In the US, investors are eager to come in early; they compete to back founders before the outcome is obvious. In Stockholm, there’s a tendency to wait for more proof before committing, which means promising companies either stall at a critical moment or have to look abroad for the capital that should be available at home. That’s something the ecosystem still needs to solve.

For the near future, I’m particularly optimistic about one trend: hardware is becoming interesting to investors again, and for a good reason. Complex software can today be replicated quickly with AI tools. Your moat is increasingly built through distribution and solutions that are genuinely hard to replace. You can’t prompt-engineer your way to an alarm or energy device installed in ten thousand homes.

Thank you very much for sharing your inspiring story, Hampus. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

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