Staffan Hillberg and the business of getting there

At Apple, Staffan Hillberg had a job title that would make an ordinary business card feel underdressed: Multimedia Evangelist. He worked in Paris, explaining new technology to customers and presenting it at trade fairs. Later came QuickTime product management in California. The title changed; the task of making a technical idea understandable remained.

“My role was to be the bridge to the market.”STAFFAN HILLBERG · ON HIS APPLE ROLE

It is a useful way into a career that otherwise looks difficult to file. Hillberg helped found the network-security company AppGate. He ran a maker of greenhouse lighting. He invested in technology businesses and property. Today, he is co-founder and executive chairman of Millow, a Swedish company working with oats, mycelium and fermentation. A recruiter searching for a single industry keyword might need a second cup of coffee.

The connections become clearer when you follow the work rather than the sector. Again and again, Hillberg appears where technical expertise has to meet financing, organization and buyers. The inventions change. So do the people who know how to build them. His career offers a view of the negotiations required to turn promising technology into something another organization can actually use.

A useful education, interrupted

Hillberg’s introduction to computers came early. His father worked in the industry, and the family lived in the United States during his secondary-school years. Back in Gothenburg, he began electrical engineering studies at Chalmers in 1983. A consulting venture with friends, including Staffan Truvé, followed in 1984; a multimedia business followed in 1988. Work increasingly displaced study.

He left Chalmers without finishing and went on to earn an MBA at INSEAD. The combination matters: technical study, an appetite for business and experience working across countries. It also resists the tidy version of a professional biography in which each qualification is completed before the next sensible step begins.

His later record at Apple places him in two settings: the European organization in Paris and the QuickTime business in Cupertino. Bonnier followed. Between 1996 and 1998, he took responsibility for the media group’s online activities and its sponsorship of MIT Media Lab. Here was a media business trying to understand the internet, with a former multimedia product manager helping to work out the commercial implications.

AppGate: putting a security business on the map

In August 1998, Hillberg began his tenure as AppGate’s co-founder and CEO. He remained chief executive until June 2000. Those dates put him inside the company’s formation and early international development, well before the later chapters associated with the AppGate name.

The early business operated in Europe and the United States and raised US$20 million from investors including ABN Amro, Deutsche Telecom and GE Equity. For a young security company, that meant dealing with several demanding audiences at once: the people building the product, the organizations buying it and the investors financing expansion.

An investment round is a milestone with plenty of work attached. Overseas operations bring their own questions about sales, staffing and delivery. AppGate gave Hillberg experience running a company across markets while explaining why its technology deserved both a budget and a place inside a customer’s organization.

After AppGate, he ran a venture capital business from 2000 to 2003 and later worked with MVI. His career moved further into investing, but the operational background remained relevant. Evaluating a company and running one offer different views of the same promises. Having occupied both seats gives the promises a certain texture.

When the customer is growing something

At Heliospectra, Hillberg’s next extended operating role took him into greenhouse lighting. He became CEO in 2010 and stayed until 2017. The company’s work combined plant science with controllable LED technology, selling equipment to growers and research organizations.

His explanation of the product began with the people doing the science. In a 2016 interview, he emphasized that plant biologists had founded the company. Their knowledge of plants informed the engineering of the lights. It was a revealing order of operations: understand what the living system needs, then build equipment around it.

That approach also describes a management problem. An engineering team, a biologist and a commercial grower bring different questions to the same lamp. The equipment must support an intended growing result and make sense in an operating business. A sale depends on those concerns meeting in a product the buyer can evaluate.

When Heliospectra announced his departure as CEO in January 2017, it described a business of more than 30 employees across two continents. It credited his period in charge with raising more than US$29 million in equity and taking the company onto Nasdaq First North, followed by US market access through an American depositary receipt arrangement.

Ali Ahmadian took over on February 1. Hillberg initially stayed involved as an adviser on capital markets and investor relations and then joined the board. He remained a director until the 2021 board transition. The handover made room for a new leader while retaining some of the experience accumulated during the company’s earlier development. It also marked a change in Hillberg’s own work: less day-to-day management, with a continuing role in the financing and governance of a business he had helped develop.

The names that keep returning

A biography can make company building sound like a sequence of individual performances. Hillberg’s public account of his 2024 honorary doctorate gives a more populated picture. He thanked Martin Skoglund, his collaborator over two decades, alongside colleagues at Heliospectra and Millow. He singled out Mohammad Taherzadeh and his team and acknowledged Staffan Truvé as a friend and role model.

The acknowledgments connect otherwise separate entries on a CV. Truvé belongs to his early entrepreneurial life. Skoglund appears in his investment and company-building work. Taherzadeh brings the scientific expertise behind the fermentation business. The continuity sits partly in relationships that carry into another project.

Hillberg’s investment work extends through Wood & Hill, where he is CEO, and board assignments including 36 Group. Boson Energy lists him as a non-executive director, with experience in corporate finance, acquisitions and property development. These roles place him on several sides of the business-building process, from a management assignment to oversight and financing.

The variety is striking, but the people around each business matter more than a list of sectors. A board member contributes one kind of judgment; a scientist or product specialist contributes another. Experience becomes useful when those contributions can be put to work together.

Oats, mycelium and a name that travelled

Millow brings that combination into food production. The company was founded in 2020 under the name Svampsson. Hillberg has recalled that a small group put in its own capital and worked quietly. The original name carried a Swedish mushroom joke; he also acknowledged its limitations for international use.

By 2023, Svampsson had become Millow. Rob Janoff, the designer behind Apple’s logo, worked on the brand. The Apple connection makes a pleasing loop in Hillberg’s story, although branding is only one part of the company’s task. A name may travel easily. Production equipment still needs installing.

The scientific work belongs to Taherzadeh and his research collaborators. Millow’s process grows mycelium on Nordic oats using dry-state fermentation. The company describes texture engineering that controls fungal growth to produce a fibrous structure, alongside modular bioreactors and development facilities for industrial partners.

This gives Hillberg another setting in which specialist knowledge needs a commercial organization around it. The scientist’s work underpins the process. Production teams must make it repeatable. Food-service customers need a usable ingredient. Each responsibility has an owner, and each affects whether the others can do their work.

A commercial chapter, still being written

In March 2026, Millow appointed Fredrik Öhrn CEO. At the same time, it announced that Taherzadeh would leave academia to work at the company full-time. Öhrn brought international commercial experience from businesses including Sodexo and American Express. Hillberg continued as chairman.

The company was building a production facility in a former LEGO production hall in Stenkullen, near Gothenburg, with support from the European Innovation Council’s EIC Accelerator. The announcement set out plans to enter Swedish food service with mince and formable products. A former toy-making space was being prepared for a rather different sort of assembly.

In August, Millow announced a €2 million financing round led by Magnus Emilson. Jan Enhager, a Vitamin Well co-founder, joined as an investor and strategic adviser. The stated purpose of the funding was to expand production capacity and build a commercial team for Nordic food-service customers.

Those details give the current chapter its scale and its limits. The financing supports a plan; the commercial team has customers to win and serve. Experience at earlier companies offers context for Hillberg’s role without deciding the outcome of this one. The next stage depends on execution by the people now responsible for it.

His advice on innovation has emphasized complementary skills, collaboration with other companies and a purpose beyond financial return. At Millow, those preferences have a concrete setting: researchers, process specialists and commercial staff working on the same business from different directions.

Hillberg once had the splendidly expansive title of Multimedia Evangelist. His present title, executive chairman, is more conventional. The work underneath it still involves helping people with different expertise agree on what happens next. After software, security and lighting, there is a factory near Gothenburg, a team to assemble and an ingredient to get into kitchens.