News April 19, 2022: coherence, Encore, Cerve, Dogdater, Bitrefill, Juni, Dugga, Voima Ventures and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector.

Funding news

• coherence (Malmö, open platform for building scalable and persistent multiplayer games and virtual worlds): $8M in a funding round led by Griffin Gaming Partners, with participation from other undisclosed investors (English).
• Encore (Stockholm, backend development engine): $3M in a funding round led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from Acequia Capital, Essence Venture Capital and Third Kind Venture Capital (English).
• Cerve (Jönköping, infrastructure platform that automates wholesalers’ sales operations): $2M in a seed round led by Orkla Ventures, with participation from MP Pensjon and nFront Ventures (English).
• Dogdater (Stockholm, mobile community app for dogs): SEK1.5M (€140K, $160K) from angel investors Arne Engvall and Thomas Silbersky (Swedish, machine translation).

>> Daily updated, subscriber-exclusive Google sheet with all funding rounds raised by private Swedish startups and scaleups. Request access.

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Stockholm-based Bitrefill, which lets people buy gift cards and refill phones with cryptocurrencies, created an internet-connected shoe that will display the live price of bitcoin on an LED matrix panel (English).
• Gothenburg-based Juni is about to open its e-commerce banking platform for German customers in what co-founder and CEO Samir El-Sabini calls a "soft launch" (Swedish / DI Digital paywall).
• The Stockholm-based digital learning assessment platform Dugga announced that it successfully conducted digital national exams in Thailand (English).
• The Swedish FinTech Association published the 2022 edition of its fintech report "Fintechrapporten" (Swedish, machine translation, complete report in Swedish as PDF).
• Finnish VC firm Voima Ventures recruited Jenny Engerfelt as Sweden-based Investment Director. She was previously at Almi Invest (English / soft paywall, alternative URL).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Andreessen Horowitz unveils an accelerator for early-stage entrepreneurs (English).
• 16 things to know about raising debt for startups (English).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• Major solar breakthrough means energy can be stored for up to 18 years, Swedish scientists say (English).

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That's it for today.