Oliver Edholm

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in February 2022 that he is a self-taught programmer who first became interested in coding at 12 by building customized Minecraft experiences, and that he moved on to building mobile apps after realizing that they, like Minecraft, used Java.⁠[1]

In his interview on the eCommerce Podcast he said that as a child he liked computers and computer games and played a great deal of Minecraft, and that this was how he got into coding.⁠[2]

In the same interview he recalled that at 13 or 14, in middle school, he came across the book “Superintelligence” by the Oxford professor Nick BostromNick BostromNick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher who was founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford from 2005 to 2024 and is known for his work on existential risk, the simulation argument and his book Superintelligence; now principal researcher at the Macrostrategy Research Initiative, he appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2020.Open the full entry, which he called “a pivotal moment for me.” He said that he was then very much looking for a meaning in life, that after reading it he went all in on learning about artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that he was already skipping lessons at school at that time.⁠[2]

TechCrunch wrote that he first started working at Klarna when he was only 15 and describes him as working there as a data scientist; Klarna, he said, “had to pull a lot of strings” to get him working there.⁠[1]

In his own account, he got in touch with Klarna when he was 15, the company was welcoming and let him do a summer internship in its AI research team, and he was able to stay on afterward.⁠[2]

Descriptions of his position at Klarna differ: in the Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview of February 2021, the answer to “Tell us about yourself” says that at 15 he started as an AI research engineer at Klarna and was then “the youngest artificial intelligence researcher in the world”; the show notes of the Do Explain podcast of January 2023 say he worked at Klarna as a machine learning engineer; and Depict’s own website says he became “the youngest AI researcher in history” when he joined Klarna at fifteen.⁠[3][4][5]

TechCrunch wrote that after finishing middle school he left formal education and turned to home schooling.⁠[1]

Matt Edmundson, host of the eCommerce Podcast, said in his introduction that he dropped out of high school when he was 15. He himself said on the program that he was already working on things he loved and saw himself doing in the future, which was how he came to the decision to drop out of high school; he added that he had not really enjoyed school either, referring to the process of learning in the Swedish school system. The show notes of the Do Explain podcast call him a high school dropout.⁠[2][4]

Asked how his parents reacted to his leaving school, he said they were “incredibly open minded and supportive,” but that parents do not automatically say yes on hearing something like that, and that it was a process.⁠[2]

TechCrunch wrote that when he was 16 he used the money he had saved from his Klarna work and from selling apps in the app store to buy a ticket to Singapore, where he decided he needed to live to build a different startup: an AI-based accessibility platform for the web, to help people with visual impairments use the internet. He stayed in Singapore for six months on a short-term visa, financing his time there with consultancy work. “I was very naive. I was inspired by the film Catch Me If You Can,” he said. Eventually, TechCrunch wrote, he realized that it would be a huge challenge to build the project out as a business.⁠[1]

On the eCommerce Podcast he said that he had an adventurous streak, that what he built in Singapore was an app to help blind and vision-impaired people browse websites, unrelated to Depict, and that he got a collaboration with the National University of Singapore. The host’s introduction put it this way: at 16 he moved across the world and hustled his way into a machine learning research position at the National University of Singapore. The show notes of the Do Explain podcast say that he lived in Singapore, where he conducted AI research at the age of 16.⁠[2][4]

Depict.ai’s press release of February 2022 states that the company was founded in 2019 by him, as chief executive officer and then 17 years old, and Anton Osika, as chief technology officer, a former employee of Sana Labs.⁠[6][1]

TechCrunch wrote that he first came up with the idea for Depict.ai when he was working as a data scientist at Klarna. On the eCommerce Podcast he said the seed of Depict came from his work at Klarna and from consulting for various e-commerce sites. The Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview says he was inspired to start Depict.ai after learning that nearly all e-commerce sites use AI methods that need far more data than those sites have; case studies at large companies such as Amazon and Alibaba showed that AI worked, he said, while smaller sites rarely had enough data to build comparable recommendations.⁠[1][2][3]

On when the company began, the Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview of February 2021 says it started about a year earlier, while Y Combinator’s company page and the Depict page of the startup directory The Hub both give 2019 as the year Depict was founded. The team list on The Hub’s page shows him as founder and chief executive officer and Anton Osika as founder and chief technology officer.⁠[3][7][8]

TechCrunch wrote that he applied to Y Combinator as a Plan B, to work on Depict.ai, which had yet to launch; by the time he got a slot to interview he had moved back to Stockholm without informing Y Combinator, so he had to fly back to Asia, to Bangalore, for the in-person meeting before being accepted. Because of Covid-19 he eventually went through the program remotely; Depict.ai, TechCrunch wrote, was in the first Y Combinator cohort to go through the program during a lockdown. The Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview says the company was accepted into Y Combinator in summer 2020.⁠[1][3]

Depict.ai’s seed round was $2.8 million, led by Initialized CapitalInitialized CapitalInitialized Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm headquartered in San Francisco, United States, founded in 2011 by Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, and Harj Taggar, and an early investor in companies such as Coinbase, Instacart, Cruise, and Flexport. In December 2021 it announced it had raised $700 million in new funds; after Tan became President and CEO of Y Combinator in early 2023, Brett Gibson became managing partner.Open the full entry with participation from EQTEQTEQT is a global private markets investment manager that originated in Sweden, with businesses spanning private capital, infrastructure, real estate, and secondaries. It was founded in 1994 by Conni Jonsson with the support of Investor AB, AEA Investors, and SEB, and listed in Stockholm in 2019; it has since expanded by integrating Exeter, LSP, Baring Private Equity Asia, and Coller Capital.Open the full entry Ventures, Y Combinator and Northzone. The Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview of February 2021 already mentions the $2.8 million raised, while Depict.ai’s press release of February 2022 says the Series A came a year after the seed round, and TechCrunch’s article of the same month says the company raised the seed round “last year.” The press list on Depict’s website includes a 2020 article in Dagens Industri headed “Svenske 18-åringen tar in 25 miljoner från EQT och Northzone – för att utmana AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry” (Swedish 18-year-old raises 25 million from EQT and Northzone to challenge Amazon).⁠[6][1][3][5]

The host of the eCommerce Podcast said in his introduction that at 18 his company was valued at $15 million.⁠[2]

Retail Technology Innovation Hub published a written interview with him, dated February 24, 2021 on the page, calling him the co-founder of Depict.ai. In it he said that Depict.ai offers instant, “Amazon quality” product recommendations to any e-commerce store, that integration takes about five minutes and that results can be verified by A/B testing; the company had won some of the largest Scandinavian retail and e-commerce brands as customers.⁠[3]

In the same interview he said that Depict.ai’s system analyses products, images and descriptions, and that simply by showing customers more relevant products some companies were seeing a 300% increase in sales. Asked about the industry’s reaction, he said the company explains to customers that its integration method is very simple, that customers can then objectively see and measure the impact of the algorithm right away, and that word of mouth had travelled quickly, with many companies reaching out.⁠[3]

Asked about his biggest challenge, he said it was keeping up with demand and that the company was hiring as fast as it could; asked about the biggest challenges facing online retail, he said it was keeping up with all the developments under way, with so much innovation and so many players, so that retailers, traditional ones especially, need to get on top of the technology, logistics and services available; asked about the following 12 months, he said Depict.ai wanted to be much more prevalent in the US market, not just in Scandinavia.⁠[3]

On January 6, 2022, the Thiel Foundation announced a new class of 23 Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry recipients that included him. The announcement gives his age as 19 and his location as Stockholm, Sweden, and describes his project, Depict.ai, as providing online retailers with a product recommendation system that allows them to focus on continuing to make and curate exceptional products. It states that fellows receive $100,000 during the two-year program.⁠[9]

TechCrunch’s article of February 2022 notes that he is now also a Thiel Fellow, and the show notes of the Do Explain podcast of January 2023 likewise call him a Thiel Fellow.⁠[1][4]

On February 24, 2022, Depict.ai announced a $17 million Series A led by Tiger Global, with participation from Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Y Combinator and a group of angel investors. The angels named in the release are Fredrik Hjelm, chief executive and co-founder of Voi; Johannes Schildt, chief executive and co-founder of Kry; Carl Rivera, chief executive and co-founder of Tictail; Erik BernhardssonErik BernhardssonFounder and CEO of Modal.Open the full entry, creator of the Spotify recommendation engine; Northzone; Nicolas Dessaigne, chief executive and co-founder of Algolia; Vidit Aatrey, chief executive and co-founder of Meesho; Joshua BrowderJoshua BrowderJoshua Browder is an entrepreneur and venture investor who founded the consumer-rights service DoNotPay in 2015 and leads it as chief executive; the service was once promoted as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” He was selected as a Thiel Fellow in 2018 and launched the venture fund Browder Capital. In September 2024 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) brought an administrative complaint over DoNotPay’s “AI lawyer” claims; DoNotPay agreed to settle, and the final order was issued in January 2025.Open the full entry, chief executive and founder of DoNotPay; and Finbarr Taylor, chief executive and co-founder of Shogun.⁠[6][1]

The release says the company’s product recommendations need no historical sales data or user behavior data and instead rely on neural networks trained on product images and product information, that they can raise e-commerce revenue by 4 to 6 percent, and that Depict.ai is the leading solution in Scandinavia; the money was to be used to keep up with demand, grow the team, enter new markets, starting with Europe and the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, and invest further in the product. In it he, then 19, says, “Up until now, the benefits of AI have been reserved for the e-commerce tech giants,” and adds that the company’s ambition is to bring retailers all the AI infrastructure they need for product discovery.⁠[6]

TechCrunch wrote that the Stockholm-based company had signed 60 customers, including Office Depot and Staples, and that it gets its data by scraping a wide range of websites. Other recommendation systems, he explained, usually look only at a retailer’s own historical data, while modern machine learning needs very large amounts of data to function properly. John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global, called the technology “completely novel” because it does not require historical sales data.⁠[1]

The eCommerce Podcast, hosted by Matt Edmundson, carries on its website an episode with him as the guest, titled “How AI Is Changing Shopping: Product Recommendations” and dated October 6, 2022 on the page. The host said in his introduction that he founded Depict at 17 and, now 19, led a team of 35 employees. He himself said on the program that the company had raised over 20 million US dollars in multiple funding rounds and had over 35 employees.⁠[10][2]

On January 23, 2023, Do Explain, a podcast hosted by Christofer Lövgren, released an interview with him running about 1 hour 31 minutes. The show notes describe him as a 20-year-old high school dropout and the founder and chief executive of Depict, state that Depict had raised $20 million and employed 40 people at the time of writing, and say that he is recognized by ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry in its 30 Under 30 list.⁠[4]

The topics listed in the show notes are Minecraft and programming, dropping out of high school, joining Y Combinator, AI recommendation engines, why Depict is different from larger competitors, the role of emotions in decision-making, and meditation.⁠[4]

The Swedish business outlet EFN, in an article on LovableLovableLovable is an AI-powered natural-language programming tool for generating, modifying and publishing websites and web applications through conversation. It is developed by a team co-founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, with roots in the open-source GPT Engineer project. The team started the business in 2023 and launched the Lovable-branded product in November 2024. It subsequently expanded into cloud backends, collaboration, mobile building and enterprise application development.Open the full entry published on August 9, 2025, wrote that Lovable’s chief executive, Anton Osika, has a background in engineering physics at KTH, worked on particle physics at CERN in Switzerland, became one of the first employees of the Swedish AI company Sana Labs and then founded the e-commerce platform Depict together with “det omtalade AI-underbarnet Oliver Edholm” (the much-talked-about AI prodigy Oliver Edholm). The article adds that Fabian Hedin, Lovable’s co-founder and technology chief, was previously an employee of Depict.⁠[11]

The law firm Howard Kennedy published on August 19, 2025 an interview with Alex Hamben, product and growth manager at Depict. It says that Depict began in 2019 as a product recommendation tool and went through Y Combinator before raising a $17 million Series A; that after the pandemic, as brands cut costs, the company dropped its early focus on recommendations, moved to product listing pages and narrowed its focus to fashion and lifestyle brands; and that its merchandising framework is used by brands including Toteme, Sandqvist and Osprey London.⁠[12]

In November 2026 the “About” page of Depict’s website says the company was “Founded by Oliver Edholm”; the team list on that page has 17 people, gives Josep Nolla as chief executive officer and does not include him. The page’s press list includes a 2026 article in Breakit headed “Depict får ny vd: ‘Blev headhuntad’” (Depict gets a new CEO: “Was headhunted”). The page shows Initialized, Y Combinator, Tiger Global, EQT Ventures and Northzone as the company’s backers, and its footer gives Depictai AB as the copyright holder.⁠[5]

Y Combinator’s company page stated in November 2026 that Depict has 32 employees, is based in Stockholm, Sweden, and offers search and merchandising for fashion e-commerce.⁠[7]

A large part of the Do Explain episode of January 2023 is about meditation: the topics named in its title and show notes include the four jhanas, Dzogchen and “pointing-out instructions,” and the chapter list has parts on the jhanas and on the Dzogchen pointing-out instruction.⁠[4]

The press list on the “About” page of Depict’s website includes four Swedish articles from 2020: Dagens Nyheter’s “18-åriga AI-geniet utmanar Amazon” (18-year-old AI genius challenges Amazon), the Dagens Industri article on the funding, an item labelled IGD Techworld and linked to computersweden.se, “Här är tekniken som ‘världens yngsta AI-forskare’ ska utmana Amazon med” (This is the technology with which “the world’s youngest AI researcher” will challenge Amazon), and Företagarna’s “Han skapar ett alternativ till Amazon” (He is creating an alternative to Amazon).⁠[5]

The list also includes Breakit’s 2021 article “Oliver Edholms Depict vill att alla e-handlare ska kunna tävla med Amazon – växer snabbt” (Oliver Edholm’s Depict wants every online retailer to be able to compete with Amazon – growing fast).⁠[5]

Klarna: Official website: https://www.klarna.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Depict: Official website: https://depict.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Y Combinator: Official website: https://www.ycombinator.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliver-edholm-ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4][8][10]