I started my journey on the basketball court. As a teenager I represented Sweden’s national youth team and moved to the Arctic Circle at 16 to pursue a professional career. After several surgeries ended that dream, I redirected my competitive mindset toward academics, studying at the Stockholm School of Economics while coaching basketball. At 23, after leading my team to a national championship, I became the youngest youth national team coach in Sweden.

During university, two teammates and I founded our first startup: initially a tutoring app, which pivoted into an IT-consulting model where we trained our classmates in the skills companies actually paid for. We documented the journey on TikTok, grew to 200,000 followers, and soon people asked us to teach them too. That demand turned into an online education company helping adults learn programming alongside full-time jobs and transition into tech by combining their previous experience with new technical skills.

To acquire customers, we relied heavily on paid social advertising and faced all the frustrations that come with it. In April 2025 we entered Lovable’s global AI hackathon to solve our own marketing problem. Out of 2,000 teams, we won. That’s when Stardust was born.

Immediately after the win, we pre-sold the product and reached €100k ARR before writing a single line of code. Since then, we’ve iterated closely with customers and raised €1.7M in pre-seed funding to build a new category in marketing: Evolution Marketing. A self-learning intelligence that helps brands understand why their ads work.