Mikael
Carlsson

Profile

The man mid-stride

When Mikael Carlsson arrived at Forte Group in October 2022, he walked into a firm that had spent 25 years quietly doing the work most tech companies talk about. No venture capital. No splashy fundraising rounds. Just client delivery, engineering talent, and compounding trust - 400 clients, 90% of them staying long-term. His job was to take something that worked and make it matter at the next scale.

By the end of 2025, Forte Group had closed its best financial year on record. That is not a coincidence.

Carlsson came from a world of scale. Before Forte, he had spent years as Executive Vice President and General Manager at Lohika, the Ukraine-based nearshore engineering firm he helped grow fivefold in revenue before Capgemini acquired it. He stayed on through the transition, leading Software Product Engineering for Capgemini's global practice, before deciding his next chapter belonged somewhere with more room to build. That somewhere turned out to be a bootstrapped software shop in Boca Raton with a 25-year head start and a deep bench of engineers.

His career arc reads like a survey of the engineering services industry: GlobalLogic, TietoEvry, Altran, Lohika, Capgemini, and now Forte. Each stop a different geography, a different ownership structure, a different growth challenge. What connects them is a consistent bet on people - specifically on the idea that soft skills travel further than technical specs.

"The real differentiator is our people's soft skills," he told the company on its anniversary. "The ability to listen, collaborate, empathize, and communicate honestly." That is either something a CEO says because it sounds right, or something a CEO says because 20 years of watching engineering teams succeed and fail has convinced them it is true. In Carlsson's case, the track record suggests the latter.

His business philosophy is similarly concrete. He does not chase lowest hourly rates - that model is ending, in his view. The future of global delivery is about outcomes, relationships, and the kind of trust that comes from telling clients the uncomfortable truth. "We don't just say what's easy," he has said. "We say what's real, and we do it with empathy." For a tech services firm, that is a differentiated promise. Most competitors lead with stack depth or delivery velocity. Forte leads with honesty.

Carlsson studied at Henley Business School, one of Europe's more respected MBA programs, before building a career that has taken him across Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and North America. He is based in San Francisco, which places him at the intersection of client demand and engineering supply chains that stretch from Krakow to Bogota.

The strategic pivot he is steering is from "services" to "outcomes" - and now into what he calls the era of AI. Forte Group is repositioning as an AI-native product development partner, embedding artificial intelligence across the entire software lifecycle rather than bolting it on. Under his watch, the company has structured its offer around three waves: AI-accelerated custom software, AI as a driver of revenue growth and efficiency, and data infrastructure as the foundation for all of it.

His colleagues at Forte include Michael Makishima, the company's co-founder, with whom Carlsson had worked at both Capgemini and Lohika before converging again here. That kind of pre-existing trust between CEO and founder tends to accelerate decisions that otherwise stall in committee. At Forte, it shows.

Employees have noticed. His CEO approval rating sits at 89 out of 100 - placing him in the top 5% of leaders at similarly sized companies. That number comes from 52 employee ratings, not a PR campaign. It is the kind of score that gets harder to maintain, not easier, as organizations scale. Carlsson appears to understand the difference between leading a firm of 200 and leading one of 900 - and has calibrated accordingly.

The company he runs now serves Fortune 500 companies and mid-market clients across financial services, healthcare, SaaS, supply chain, and media. It has 12 global delivery locations. And it has been fully bootstrapped since its founding in 2000 - which means every expansion has been funded by client work, not investor capital. When Carlsson says "we grew by investing in people and staying true to who we are," that is not inspirational language. That is the actual balance sheet.

The thesis going forward is this: the software development industry is about to bifurcate between firms that embed AI into their core delivery and firms that treat it as a feature. Carlsson is betting Forte belongs in the first group. Given where he started - QA testing, outsourced delivery, hourly billing - and where the company stands now - AI-native engineering partner, all-time revenue high - that bet looks increasingly well-placed.