In Financial Times’ annual survey of the fastest-growing companies in Europe, FT1000, Vakanta is ranked fifth in 2024. Vakanta thereby holds the position as both Europe’s fastest-growing IT company and the fastest-growing Swedish company across all categories. The revenue increased by 9,564.8% during the period 2019-2022.
Vakanta’s SaaS provides ordering companies with control over their external workforce, such as consultants and freelancers. This industry has been thriving since the digital revolution gained momentum and the pandemic reshaped the job market. In a report from 2019, Boston Consulting Group predicted that the gig economy would represent 20-30% of Europe’s total workforce by 2025, and many companies currently allocate up to 30% of their total procurement budget to external labour.
Competition for top talent, tighter procurement budgets, and the new 24-month rule of the Swedish hiring law force hiring companies to take control and integrate their external workforce with HR—an emerging strategy known as Total Talent Acquisition (TTA).
It was with this future in mind that Vakanta was founded in 2013.
“What makes Vakanta a bit special is that we have worked hand in hand with hiring managers at clients’ such as Bosch, Teledyne FLIR, and Northvolt, while most other similar systems have been developed with a clear focus on procurement,” says Vakanta’s founder and CEO, Johan Hanson, in a comment to the Financial Times survey. “Managers can therefore easily get started with Vakanta, while HR and Procurement get the holistic data that was previously completely missing. So, Financial Times’ recognition is certainly exciting for us as a company, but above all, it’s proof that this is an important area—that the right product can grow so tremendously despite our barely investing anything into marketing. At Vakanta, we have a relatively small team, and we have almost exclusively focussed on product development all these years. And it is, of course, a joy and relief that it now generates such a clear result.”
For all companies on the list—there were several Swedish ones!—take a look at https://www.ft.com/ft1000-2024.”