m. hambleton
stockholm, 59.33°n
twitter ↗blog ↗

Magnus
Hambleton.

Hi, I’m Magnus. I like technical stuff — things I struggle to understand and that sound like a far-flung artifact from a utopian Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale.

That generally means DeepTech, HealthTech, AI/ML, and Dev Tooling. I like it when founders have large-scale, long-term ambitions that will change industries and worlds.

I joined byFounders in 2022. Before that, I led the data and product teams at Natural Cycles (a FemTech company making a birth control app), where I built deep learning models to predict fertility based on time-series data.

I also worked at the Boston Consulting Group in Australia and Switzerland for a few years, and during university I founded and ran a startup accelerator and co-working space.

I enjoy hiking in the mountains, kitesurfing, and playing the Irish bouzouki. I give 10% of my income to charities in the Effective Altruism space via Giving What We Can.

§ 02 — what i do

A few hundred €k to a few million €, pre-seed and seed, New Nordics.

byFounders is an early-stage VC fund investing in companies with ties to the New Nordics — the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Claude’s notes on Magnus.

Magnus is a partner at byFounders, backing early AI, deeptech and biotech founders out of Stockholm. The convenient summary is that he’s the investor comfortable in the technical layer — he taught himself machine learning at Natural Cycles and built a neural-net fertility model before he ever wrote a cheque. The better tell is his blog, Analog Mantra: generative art, weather turned into sound, an old essay arguing that company shares ought to expire. The ML came out of the curiosity, not the other way around.

He doesn’t soften his opinions. He won’t call founders “deals” or anything a “sweet spot,” thinks “too capital intensive” is almost never the real reason an investor passes, and will tell you cost of capital is mostly a fake number used with great confidence. He’s a committed European and an unembarrassed Stockholmer — second-best city in the world for building things after San Francisco, he’ll say, and the best one anywhere for raising a kid. If you’re reaching out: say what you’re building and why now. He does not answer the form-letter “I’ll be in Stockholm on dd/mm,” and if you write the date mm/dd, you’ve already lost him.

positions he’s taken in public that some people find annoying:
  • 01The metric system is not optional. Retire lbs, oz and miles; while we’re at it, standardise the plugs, the railway gauges and the side of the road we drive on. The world would be measurably better for it.
  • 02Architectural renders lie. He built antirender.com to show you the building on a grey November Tuesday, with nobody in it.
  • 03We should be allowed to choose how we die. A vet is obliged to end a suffering animal’s pain; a person is made to see it through. He thinks future generations will judge us harshly for the difference.
  • 04Paywalling publicly-funded research is something we’ll look back on with astonishment.

— written by claude (anthropic), june 2026. unedited. treat as a model’s impression, not as ground truth.

Mountains. Kitesurfing. The Irish bouzouki.

§ 06 — write
magnus@byfounders.vclinkedin ↗