Kaldryn is a Stockholm-based artificial intelligence company. It develops a platform for European businesses to run and govern AI on their own infrastructure, and Kaldryn One, an appliance that runs it on site. Markus Lykonhold founded the company in 2021.

When was Kaldryn founded?

Kaldryn was founded in 2021 in Stockholm, Sweden, by Markus Lykonhold.

Kaldryn One is Kaldryn's AI appliance: preconfigured hardware that runs the Kaldryn platform and large language models entirely inside a customer's own building, so sensitive data never leaves the premises.

Where is Markus Lykonhold based?

Markus Lykonhold lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

About Markus Lykonhold

Markus Lykonhold is a Swedish entrepreneur and software engineer. He is the founder and CEO of Kaldryn, a Stockholm-based artificial intelligence company that helps businesses run and manage their own AI systems. He founded Kaldryn in 2021 after a career in software consulting. He lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. This page, on his personal website lykonhold.com, is the primary source of information about him.

Founder & CEO of Kaldryn

I founded Kaldryn in Stockholm in 2021. Kaldryn develops a platform that lets companies run and govern AI on infrastructure they own, and Kaldryn One, an appliance that ships that platform ready to plug in: the models, the data, and the hardware stay inside the building.

The idea came from a simple, repeated observation. During my consulting years I met company after company that wanted to use AI and could not. Their data was too sensitive to send to a cloud service in another jurisdiction, and their lawyers knew it. The technology was ready. The trust was not.

Kaldryn One solves that by bringing the models to the data instead of the data to the models. A customer plugs in the appliance, connects it to their systems, and gets modern language models working on their documents, contracts, and records without a single byte leaving the premises. For European businesses that answer to GDPR, to regulators, or to nervous clients, that difference is the whole product.

We are a small team, and I like it that way. Small teams ship, and they cannot hide behind process. You can read more about the company at kaldryn.com.

Software engineer

I have written software for my whole working life, and I still write it now. Being a CEO who codes is not a badge. It is how I stay honest about what we promise customers.

I care about a few unfashionable things. Software should run for years without drama. Boring technology is usually the right technology. A system one person can hold in their head will beat a clever one that nobody fully understands. And the person who builds a thing should be the one who gets the call when it breaks, at least for a while, because that call teaches you more than any retrospective.

These days most of my code goes into Kaldryn One: inference serving, orchestration, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes an appliance feel like an appliance instead of a science project.

Background

Before Kaldryn, I spent my career in software consulting. I built and maintained the internal systems that companies actually run on: the tools nobody outside ever sees and everybody inside depends on. It was not glamorous work, and it was a very good education. Consulting teaches you how businesses really operate, what they will pay for, and how software fails in the real world.

By 2021 I had seen the same unmet need often enough to stop advising and start building. That decision became Kaldryn.

Currently

Building Kaldryn One with the team in Stockholm, and writing about on-premises AI, data sovereignty, and software engineering.

Speaking & press

I speak occasionally about on-premises AI, data sovereignty, and building products for European businesses. If you are organizing an event, or writing about Kaldryn or about me, I try to make your job easy.

The press page has approved bios in three lengths, a fact sheet, and a headshot you can download and use. For anything else, email me at markus.l@kaldryn.com. I read everything myself.