Aimpoint's Swedish Origin: The Company That Built the Red Dot

A reflection that would not move

The story Aimpoint tells about itself begins in a bathroom in Malmö, the port city at Sweden's southern tip, in 1974. Arne Ekstrand was a technician, an amateur hunter and a former soldier. According to a 2025 company portrait by the German shooting magazine all4shooters, he was shaving when he noticed a point of light reflected in his mirror. As he moved his head, the reflection seemed to stay put.

Most people would have finished shaving. Ekstrand saw an aiming device. If a point of light could appear to float over a target and stay there no matter where your eye was, a hunter would no longer have to line up a rear sight, a front sight and a moving animal. You would put the dot on the target and shoot.

Aimpoint's own history says Ekstrand was trying to solve a specific hunter's problem: improving accuracy on moving targets. His answer, when he finally built it, was spectacularly low-tech.

The toilet-roll prototype

Ekstrand did not have a workshop or money. What he had, by Aimpoint's account, was an empty toilet-paper roll. The all4shooters portrait describes the rest: an LED soldered to two wires and powered by a battery, mounted inside the cardboard tube. It was crude, it had no adjustment mechanism, and it worked well enough to prove the idea.

Aimpoint still enjoys this detail. The company describes itself as one of few large international optics companies that can trace its origins to a toilet roll.

What Ekstrand needed was someone who could turn a cardboard proof of concept into a precision instrument. That person was Gunnar Sandberg, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur who had founded the firm Elektro Sandberg in 1959. Sandberg financed the development and, as Aimpoint tells it, gave the project a basement workspace on Borrgatan in Malmö's harbor.

1975: the first commercial red dot

The patent was approved in February 1975, and Aimpoint AB was founded that year. Its first product, the Aimpoint Electronic, also arrived in 1975. Aimpoint describes it as the world's first commercial red dot sight.

The design, as all4shooters describes it, projected an LED dot onto a slightly curved front lens. The diode sat at the lower inside of the tube and bounced its light diagonally onto that lens, which reflected it back toward the shooter's eye. A small diaphragm let the dot's size, roundness and brightness be tuned.

That is still the basic principle of a reflex sight today. The curved, coated lens reflects the dot's color while letting the rest of the view through, and the geometry makes the dot appear to sit out at the target. It is why you can shoot a red dot with both eyes open. It is also why the dot can appear to move slightly with your head at close range, the parallax effect explained in the site's parallax guide.

There were three generations of the Electronic, which Aimpoint lists as G1, G2 and G3. The line was replaced by the 1000 series in 1987.

An insider tip among hunters

For its first years, Aimpoint was what the all4shooters portrait calls an insider tip among hunters and sport shooters. Hunting was the original market, which makes sense given where Ekstrand started.

The first military order came in 1980, from the Swedish armed forces. Later in the decade the Aimpoint 3000 picked up awards in the U.S. and France. Aimpoint's 50th-anniversary timeline names the 3000 series Optical Product of the Year in both countries.

Then came a photograph.

The Gulf War photo

In 1991, during the Gulf War, U.S. special operations personnel were photographed with Aimpoint-equipped carbines. Aimpoint's history places the scene in Riyadh and says the photos spread around the world. Military interest in red dot sights, in Aimpoint's words, "exploded" afterward.

It is worth being careful with the cause and effect here. One set of photos did not make red dots happen on its own. But it is a clear marker of when a hunting accessory began to look like serious military equipment to a much wider audience.

The M68 Close Combat Optic

In 1997, Aimpoint won a major U.S. Army contract for its Comp sight, which became the M68 Close Combat Optic. The two company histories give slightly different figures for the size of that first order, but both describe it as large. The Army contract pushed Aimpoint to scale up quickly.

Aimpoint says production for that contract began in Gällivare, a small town in Swedish Lapland, with three workers, and the workforce there grew to 40. A new factory opened in Malmö at the end of the 1990s to add capacity.

Ten years later, in 2007, Aimpoint won a U.S. procurement it describes as being for 565,000 sights, which it calls "the largest red dot sight procurement ever." The Comp M4 was the sight in that era.

Going small: Micro, then Acro

The other big thread in Aimpoint's history is miniaturization. The Micro series launched in 2007, a compact tube sight that became a common choice for carbines and hunting rifles. Its second generation followed in 2014. The Micro's mounting pattern also became widely copied, which is part of why the site's footprint guide spends time on T1/T2 interfaces.

In 2018 Aimpoint launched the Acro, which it describes as the first fully enclosed pistol optic. Its second generation arrived in 2021. The enclosed design, which seals the LED behind glass so debris cannot block it, is now one of the main design trends in pistol dots, covered in the site's enclosed-emitter guide.

In 2025 Aimpoint launched the COA with Glock's A-CUT mounting system, according to its 50th-anniversary timeline.

The numbers behind fifty years

The all4shooters portrait, published as Aimpoint turned 50, gives a set of milestones that show how the business grew:

The same portrait says the total has passed five million, and that Aimpoint had 460 employees worldwide in 2024. It also says all Aimpoint sights are still made in Sweden, at Gällivare and Malmö, and that the company has been part of Sandberg Development throughout its 50 years.

Ekstrand died in 2004, aged 84, according to all4shooters. He lived long enough to see his bathroom-mirror idea become standard equipment.

Myth vs fact

Myth: Aimpoint invented the reflex sight. Reflector sights, which project a reticle onto a glass for aircraft and guns, existed long before 1975. Aimpoint's claim is narrower: it says the Aimpoint Electronic was the first commercial red dot sight. Wikipedia describes it as the first LED red dot reflector sight, but flags that claim as needing a citation.

Myth: red dots were a military idea adapted for hunters. For Aimpoint, it went the other way. The product began as a hunter's solution and found its military market later.

Fact: the first prototype really was a toilet roll. That one comes straight from the company.

Where Aimpoint sits today

Fifty years on, Aimpoint's catalog runs from the Comp tube sights to the Micro and the Acro family. Its products tend to be defined by the things the original design prized: simple controls, a single clean dot and long battery life. Aimpoint lists the Comp M5s at 50,000 hours of run time at a mid daylight setting on one AAA cell.

If you want to see the current lineup, Optics Planet carries the Aimpoint Acro family and the Aimpoint CompM5. For how a modern dot fits into a rifle or pistol setup, start with the site's red dot buyer's guide.

It is a lot of history to come out of one reflection in a mirror. But the core idea Ekstrand had that morning has hardly changed: put a point of light where you want the shot to go.

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