Niclas Lilja

Founder & CEO Younium

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Niclas Lilja is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Younium, a Stockholm-based subscription management platform for B2B companies, founded in 2017. Younium addresses the operational problem that emerges once a software business moves from selling licences to selling subscriptions: contracts become living objects that change mid-term, invoicing has to reflect those changes accurately, and revenue recognition has to satisfy accounting standards without a finance team rebuilding spreadsheets every month. Younium consolidates subscription management, invoicing and billing, financial reporting and data insight into a single hub, positioned specifically at B2B rather than consumer subscription businesses, where contract complexity is the defining difficulty. Lilja did not come to the problem cold — he spent more than twelve years at Medius, the Swedish procure-to-pay software company, finishing as Senior Vice President of Product and Offering, and left that role in 2017 to start Younium with Martin Kåver and Per Nordling. The company has since grown from a Nordic team into an operation spanning four international hubs in Europe with a growing US presence.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Younium, established in Stockholm in 2017.
• Co-founded the company with Martin Kåver, now Head of Sales, and Per Nordling, now chairman of the board.
• Grew Younium from a small Nordic team into an organization across four international hubs in Europe with a growing United States presence.
• Raised approximately €2.7 million in a funding round, within total reported funding of roughly $3 million across two rounds.
• Senior Vice President of Product and Offering at Medius from 2011 to 2017.
• Product & Marketing Manager at Medius from 2009 to 2011, and Development Manager from 2004 to 2009.
• Holds a Master of Science from Linköping University.

Professional Journey

Lilja studied at Linköping University between 1997 and 2002, taking a Master of Science, and then built his career in Swedish enterprise software.

From December 2004 he worked at Medius, the procure-to-pay and accounts-payable automation company, where he stayed more than twelve years and moved through three distinct functions. He began as a Development Manager, running engineering; moved in 2009 into a Product and Marketing Manager role, which took him into how the product was positioned and sold as well as how it was built; and from 2011 served as Senior Vice President of Product and Offering, owning the company’s product strategy. That progression — engineering, then product and marketing, then product leadership at executive level — gave him a complete view of how a B2B software product is conceived, packaged, priced and taken to market.

He left Medius in March 2017 and founded Younium the same year with Martin Kåver and Per Nordling. The three divided responsibilities along their strengths: Lilja took the chief executive role, Kåver took sales, and Nordling took the chairmanship of the board. The company’s premise reflected a shift that was reshaping European B2B software at the time — the move from perpetual licences to subscription and servitised business models — and the observation that the financial and contractual plumbing required to run those models well was being improvised by every company independently, usually in spreadsheets.

Younium built a platform covering the full subscription lifecycle for B2B businesses: managing subscriptions and contracts, generating invoices and handling billing, automating revenue recognition, and producing the financial reporting and data insight that subscription businesses need to understand their own recurring revenue. The focus on B2B specifically is a deliberate constraint; consumer subscription tooling handles high volume and simple contracts, whereas B2B requires handling amendments, tiering, usage components and multi-entity arrangements.

Under Lilja’s leadership the company expanded from Sweden across four international hubs in Europe and began building a United States presence, funded by a comparatively modest amount of external capital — a reported €2.7 million round within total funding of roughly $3 million — which suggests a capital-efficient growth path rather than a venture-scale land grab.

Education

Linköping University

Master of Science (M.Sc.), studied 1997-2002

No source names the field of study, so none is recorded.