Martin Källström
knowledge

People & Partners

Martin Källström's companies have run on a surprisingly small, recurring cast. The same co-founders show up across two ventures a decade apart; the same investor pattern — a lucky first meeting, a term sheet within days — repeats from Twingly to Narrative; and the people who shaped him outside the office (a wife, a friend's Facebook recommendation, a men's retreat) turn out to matter as much to the story as any funding round. This page profiles the individuals and partner organizations that recur across Twingly, Narrative, and Multiply but don't have dedicated pages of their own.

Partner & family

Veronica Gullbrandson — Martin's partner since 2020. Veronica is a master goldsmith (guldsmedsmästare) and the owner of Ädelsmedjan, the smithy she founded in Kisa in 1997, where she designs and hand-forges every piece herself in recycled silver and gold — nature-inspired forms that each begin from a single thread of metal, an approach she has carried since she first considered becoming a goldsmith at sixteen. Her work has twice been named Årets Konsthantverk by Region Östergötland (Östgötalåset 2006, Ädelbaggen 2012). adelsmedjan-se ↗ They met on Tinder in 2020; she came into Martin's life with several years of experience of open polyamory already behind her, and became his guide into that world — the relationship at the center of the personal-development arc he has told publicly in Polyprat. ▶ 7:54, ▶ 10:22 When the Borderland community's land company Alversjö Natur AB was formed, she stood on its founding board as deputy (styrelsesuppleant) alongside Martin. vimmerbytidning-se ↗

Linn Källström (b. 2004) — eldest daughter. Linn has been present in Martin's public story since she was small: photos from her ninth birthday party, captured with a Memoto prototype, were the emotional centerpiece of his 2013 pitches — "These are photos from my daughter Lynn's birthday just one week ago" ▶ 0:48, "Det är värdefullt för min dotter att ha de här bilderna" ▶ 2:08 — and a photo of her was his very definition of a "halo moment": "That's my daughter, by the way." ▶ 14:51 A decade later she reappears at 19, starting a degree in computer science and prompting Martin's reflection on studying for a field that will evolve tenfold in five years. ▶ 20:08 She is studying to civilingenjör i IT. linkedin-com ↗

Julia Källström (b. 2006) — younger daughter. Julia is the younger of the "2 daughters that are 7 and 9" Martin introduced from the CES 2014 stage ▶ 1:02, and one of the daughters whose classroom reports — classmates with ChatGPT open in every lesson — grounded his observations on real-world AI adoption. ▶ 2:21 linkedin-com ↗

The children are woven through the whole archive: wanting to hold on to how fast they were growing up is the wish Martin has named as the seed of Narrative itself — "a wish that became even stronger when I had kids." kaptur-co ↗, ▶ 3:39

Narrative's team — co-founders, twice over

Björn Wesén — the Axis R&D head who said yes. Needing a hardware co-founder for what would become Memoto, Martin asked a former Axis Communications contact, Johan Rissmyr, not for himself but for a referral — and got pointed to Björn Wesén, Axis's own R&D head. Martin drove to Lund, showed him the prototype, and days later Wesén called to say he was in; Martin hadn't expected to land someone of that caliber, and read it as proof that luck comes from having all your tentacles out. ▶ 47:55, ▶ 47:03 (press coverage variously spelled his name Wesén, Westin, and Wisén). Wesén brought over a decade as a lead camera developer at "a world-leading camera company" trueventures-com ↗, led hardware and electronics as CTO ▶ 43:56, and after the 2016 bankruptcy was the one who bought Narrative's assets out of the estate with a handful of colleagues to keep the service alive. engadget-com ↗

Oskar Kalmaru — the marketing co-founder Martin recruited twice. Kalmaru, a Stockholm-based entrepreneur who'd already founded an online video provider, became Memoto/Narrative's CMO and public face — he was the one who explained the Memoto→Narrative rebrand to the press. kickstarter-com ↗, engadget-com ↗ He came in early with prior marketing experience from Bubblar.se, a Swedish video service ▶ 43:30; a small, human detail from that era: his own son's kindergarten banned him from bringing the Memoto camera, worried about constant photography. spiegel-de ↗ (An earlier version of this page identified Kalmaru as a Multiply co-founder from a first-name mention in the podcast — the Oskar who co-founded Multiply is Oskar Lissheim-Boethius, a different person.)

Louise Lennersten — the HR manager who became Narrative's COO. Lennersten came up through human resources and joined Narrative as HR Manager; as the company's structure changed she took on more of the internal processes and her role shifted into COO — a move she described as natural, since HR already sits closest to the core of a company: its people. linkopingsciencepark-se ↗ She went on to lead 3D-visualization company Interspectral as CEO affarsstaden-se ↗ and serves on the board of Vetmigo. linkedin-com ↗

Twingly's core team

Björn Milton — CTO and co-founder. Milton built Twingly's technology as its CTO and co-founder. After Twingly he moved to Gotland, where he founded the hotel self-service app Roombler and runs the hotel Stelor. breakit-se ↗, helagotland-se ↗

Anton Johansson — CMO/CPO. Johansson ran marketing and product at Twingly ("CMO/CPO Twingly — blog search," in his own words) on a path that led through founding Osom, Alltid and Dot Sure to his current role as CEO of the e-commerce agency Grebban. antonjohansson-com ↗, linkedin-com ↗

Carl-Fredrik Wettermark — co-founder. Wettermark co-founded the company in the Primelabs era, when the team set out to scan the entire blogosphere. di-se ↗, nyteknik-se ↗ His later career went international — via the Swedish foreign service to helping impact hub Norrsken grow globally. realtid-se ↗

Hugo Hallqvist — developer. Hallqvist was a developer at Twingly and today runs his own company, Dokad Software AB. linkedin-com ↗, github-com ↗

Sebastian Björkelid — the founder who'd already built and sold Sweden's largest teen photo community. A founder at Memoto/Narrative on the UX and growth side, Björkelid had founded Bilddagboken (also called Dayviews) while at Linköping University, sold it twice — first to Luna Storm, then to Nyheter24, where he became product manager across 14 news sites before leaving a job he hated to co-found the camera company. ▶ 32:12, kickstarter-com ↗

Rasmus Adler Wahlberg — Multiply's co-founder and Martin's podcast co-host. Wahlberg co-founded Multiply with Martin and co-hosts Co-creating with AI with him episode after episode. ▶ 0:00, ▶ 0:00 Before Multiply, he'd tried building a recommendation-based social startup called Human — an attempt he later cited as an example of the innovator's-dilemma opportunity around trusted recommendations displacing influencer advertising. ▶ 20:57

Early Memoto build team. Alongside the three named co-founders, the founding group of six included Eric Hampusgård (iOS developer, ex-Sogeti), Simon Pantzare (backend developer, from lifelogging startup Linkura), and Per Brickstad (ex-Nokia industrial designer) kickstarter-com ↗; Sebastian Jansson, from Linköping's D-line program, built the company's entire image-analysis pipeline ▶ 21:01; and Niclas Johansson led special projects. fastcompany-com ↗

Investors and the cap table

The lucky Passion Capital pitch. Short on travel budget in 2012, Martin's team implied to a London VC they had other meetings lined up — mostly by accident, their first pitch meeting itself happened almost by fluke — and Passion Capital sent a term sheet within a week. Martin also called on six other founders Passion Capital had already backed to vouch for him. breakit-se ↗ Passion Capital became the first VC to invest, putting in roughly €500,000. breakit-se ↗

Heywear's team and backers

Full company detail lives on Heywear and Heywear NoHo Studio.

Hardware partners and industry connections

Narrative's hardware effort ran through Axis Communications, the Swedish camera company. Beyond co-founder Björn Wesén, engineer Björn Rosén worked with Narrative from Axis to develop the camera hardware ▶ 1:44, and the whole chain started with Johan Rissmyr, the Axis contact Martin first approached before being redirected to Wesén. ▶ 47:03 For manufacturing, the team followed a Taiwan supply chain that fellow Swedish startup Mutewatch had pioneered. blogs-wsj-com ↗

The Snapchat courtship that went nowhere. In spring 2016, with Narrative's finances deteriorating, Martin visited Snapchat's Los Angeles offices three or four times, meeting its CTO, engineering team, and a special labs division as one of several acquisition avenues he explored. breakit-se ↗ Snapchat never made clear how serious its interest was — and never disclosed that it was developing its own wearable camera at the same time, which shipped as Spectacles later that year. breakit-se ↗

Earlier still, right after university, Martin worked as a programmer at Framfab, the Swedish e-consultancy founded by Jonas Birgersson — a first employer, before Twingly or Narrative existed. en-wikipedia-org ↗, breakit-se ↗

Twingly's wider circle

Multiply's team

Rasmus Adler Wahlberg — co-founder and CEO. Martin's closest collaborator of the AI era: they co-founded Multiply together ▶ 0:00, Rasmus leads it as CEO ▶ 44:58, and side by side they host all of the Co-creating with AI podcast — sixty-plus episodes of thinking out loud about building with AI. ▶ 0:00 The podcast's texture owes much to his habit of opening from ordinary life — sledding his daughter to preschool through snow ▶ 0:18, watching her learn to ride a bike and turning it into a meditation on how humans learn versus how models do. ▶ 0:00

Henrik Eneroth and Oskar Lissheim-Boethius — the other two co-founders. Multiply was founded by a quartet: Martin, Rasmus, Henrik Eneroth — the architectural visionary of the founding team, deep in the Clojure ecosystem, maintaining open-source repositories and consulting on enterprise interaction design — and Oskar Lissheim-Boethius. ▶ 5:15, Research ↗

Magnus Wretblad — CMO. Multiply's chief marketing officer, whose industry recognition the company has celebrated on its own news pages. multiply-co ↗

Multiply and the AI-era circle

Elysium's creative team and cast

Full production detail lives on Elysium and Be Here Now. Biographical detail below is drawn from an outside AI research compilation cross-referencing the production's own credits against public sources for each individual, and is flagged as such throughout.

Family and personal life

Anix Lynch — partner and co-founder in the Bangkok years (2016–2019). Martin met Anix in 2016, and she was his girlfriend until 2019 — the relationship that frames his post-Narrative chapter in Asia. Their paths ran through Expara, the Southeast Asian venture firm, where she was investment manager while Martin was Entrepreneur in Residence in 2017–2018 — "an entrepreneur in residence at a Singapore and Bangkok-based VC company." ▶ 2:57 She was also his co-founder in the fintech venture he built from Bangkok — European investors meeting Asian real estate, with a tech team in Sweden and finance teams in Bangkok and Tokyo — which he wound down before launch. breakit-se ↗, breakit-se ↗ Startup Grind Bangkok billed her as one of two "leading venture capitalists" for its Female Leaders Month startupgrind-com ↗, Crunchbase lists her at Expara crunchbase-com ↗, and today she works as an AI/data engineer. linkedin-com ↗, github-com ↗, medium-com ↗

The fuller account of Martin's polyamory, the Mankind Project, and what he learned through both lives on Vulnerability & Masculinity.

Worth remembering