Mikael Selander — From Award-Winning POS Company to Building Vendion

Some people talk about disrupting an industry. Others actually do it — twice. Mikael Selander, formerly known as Mikke Selander and Mikke Hermansson, is one of them. He took a struggling POS company from 7 to 40 million SEK in revenue, won Sweden's most prestigious growth award three years running, and then walked away to start from scratch. This is the story of why — and what happened next.

The kid from Lysekil who refused to follow the script

Mikael Selander grew up in Lysekil, a small town on Sweden's west coast. While his peers followed their parents into local industry, Mikael had other ideas. At thirteen, he started a production company making football films and instructional videos on VHS. A year later, he was programming games and applications for graphing calculators — creations that are still available on the Texas Instruments website today.

He went on to study information systems and spent a few years in the IT industry. But it was never the technology itself that drove him. It was the act of building — taking an idea and making it real before anyone else had finished thinking.

"My greatest superpower is an insanely short distance between thought and action," as he puts it.

From new hire to CEO in three months at Ancon

In 2014, Mikael — then going by the name Mikke Hermansson — was recruited as Head of Sales at Ancon, a Swedish POS company that had been building cash register systems since 1998. Ancon had once been a respected player, but the company had lost momentum. The product was outdated, growth had stalled, and the owner was considering scaling down.

But after just three months, the owner saw something in Mikael that changed everything. Instead of winding down, he handed over the CEO position.

It was 2015. Ancon had revenue of roughly 7 million SEK and eight employees.

From 7 to 40 million — and the Gazelle Award three years straight

What Mikael Selander achieved at Ancon over the following years is one of the most impressive growth stories in Swedish SaaS history.

In 2016, he launched an entirely new product — Ancon G2 — featuring express checkouts, kitchen printers, and a modern product portfolio affordable even for small restaurants. The customer base exploded.

In 2018, he made the system cloud-based and mobile-native. Suddenly, restaurant owners could run their POS on their own phones and tablets. Ancon was no longer just a cash register — it was becoming a complete platform for restaurant operations, with sales channels, data collection, marketing tools, and loyalty systems.

The numbers tell the story. Under Mikael's leadership at Ancon:

• Revenue grew from 7 to over 40 million SEK
• The team expanded from 8 to over 30 employees
• Offices opened in Lysekil, Örebro, Gothenburg, and Stockholm
• The company won Dagens Industri's Gazelle Award three consecutive years (Sweden's most prestigious business growth prize)
• All without a single krona of external venture capital

That last point is worth pausing on. In an industry where competitors like Square, Lightspeed, and TouchBistro are backed by billions in venture funding, Mikael Selander built a POS company that beat them on their home turf — entirely bootstrapped.

"Defeat Goliath" was printed on the shirts every employee wore. It wasn't just a slogan. It was a business model.

Why he left Ancon — and what it taught him

In 2022, Mikael Selander was headhunted by Northmill, a Swedish fintech bank with major ambitions in the POS space. The mission was to build the next generation POS platform with the bank's financial infrastructure as its backbone. It sounded like the dream — resources, capital, and a vision that matched his own.

But after a few months, it became clear that vision alone wasn't enough. Mikael saw the same pattern he'd seen across the entire industry: thinking that starts with the technology and the money, not with the restaurant owner.

Leaving Ancon had been difficult. It was the company he'd built from the ground up, the team he'd recruited, the product he'd shaped. But sometimes you have to lose something to realize what you truly want to build.

"I'd solved half the problem at Ancon," says Mikael. "We'd built a fantastic POS system. But the restaurant industry doesn't need a POS system — it needs an entirely new way to run a business."

What the entire industry gets wrong

After nearly a decade in the POS industry, Mikael Selander has watched the same mistakes play out over and over. And it's not just Ancon — it's the entire market.

Everyone builds POS systems. Nobody builds platforms. Most players offer a cash register, then glue it together with third-party solutions for bookings, staff management, marketing, and analytics. The result? Fragmented systems that don't talk to each other, data trapped in silos, and restaurant owners juggling five different logins to run their business.

Everyone chases venture capital instead of customers. International giants like Square and Lightspeed have hundreds of millions in backing but deliver generic solutions that don't understand the Nordic market. Smaller players cling to legacy technology and blame price pressure.

Nobody puts the restaurant owner first. Product decisions are made by developers who've never stood behind a bar. Roadmaps are driven by investor quarterly targets, not by the reality of a stressful Saturday night with a full house.

Mikael knew it could be done better. He'd proved it once. Now he'd do it again — without compromise.

Vendion — everything he learned, pressed into one platform

Vendion isn't an iteration on Ancon. It's not an improvement on an existing concept. It's an entirely new platform, built from the ground up with a single database, designed to solve the entire restaurant problem — not just the checkout part.

Every mistake Mikael Selander observed in the industry, every frustration he experienced as CEO of Ancon, every insight about what restaurant owners actually need — it's all baked into Vendion.

One database, not ten integrations. Orders, staff, bookings, marketing, analytics, and AI live in the same system. No glue code, no external syncing, no data falling through the cracks.

AI that actually helps. Not AI as a buzzword in a pitch deck, but concrete tools that help restaurant owners make better decisions, automate the tedious stuff, and focus on what makes their restaurant unique.

Premium without apologies. Vendion costs more than the budget alternatives. That's deliberate. You get a system that's one hundred percent right for eighty percent of the market — not one that's fifty percent right for everyone. It's a philosophy Mikael brought from Ancon and refined even further.

Founder-owned. Just as Ancon was built without venture capital, Vendion is driven by its founders. No external investors steering product decisions. No quarterly targets forcing half-baked features. Just focus on building the best product.

The person behind the product

People who've worked with Mikael Selander — or Mikke, as most still call him — describe a leader who's infectious. Not through empty slogans or visionary buzzwords, but through sheer pace. Through an ability to see what needs doing and then actually doing it, while everyone else is still in the planning phase.

This is someone who became CEO after three months on the job. Who took a company from 7 to 40 million without external capital. Who won the Gazelle Award three times. Who then left it all behind and started from zero — not because things weren't going well, but because he knew it could be better.

"I've never had much patience for mediocrity," says Mikael. "It's better to jump in the water and learn to swim."

Today, Mikael lives in Lysekil, the same town he grew up in. From there, he's building Vendion with a distributed team and a vision that reaches far beyond a POS system.

Vendion today and ahead

Vendion launches in 2026, entering the Swedish restaurant market as a premium player from day one. The platform covers POS, staff management, table bookings, marketing, advanced analytics, and AI — all in one.

The ambition? To build the Nordics' best restaurant platform. Not just a POS system. Not just an app. A complete platform that lets restaurant owners focus on what they're passionate about — the food, the guests, the experience — while Vendion handles the rest.

Want to learn more about Mikael Selander and Vendion? Read about the team on our about page or book a demo to see the platform in action.