News August 1, 2022: Bemlo, Karma, Stella Sleep, FLOX and more
Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, exclusively for subscribers of Swedish Tech News.
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Subscribe to Swedish Tech News to get access to a daily newsletter that brings you a brief overview of news from the Swedish startup & tech sector, curated by Martin Weigert.
Or, if you prefer a free weekly newsletter, subscribe to Swedish Tech Weekly!
Funding news
- Bemlo (Stockholm, marketplace for short-term staffing of nurses and doctors): $3.3M in a seed round backed by Y Combinator, Long Journey Ventures, Uncommon Capital and a group of angel investors that include Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, BloomTech co-founder Austen Allred and top executives from Kry (English).
- Karma (Stockholm, anti-food waste app & order solution for restaurants): SEK25M (€2.4M, $2.5M) from undisclosed investors, for the continued expansion into the field of order and payments solutions for restaurants. The funding was raised in the beginning of 2022 but not announced publicly. Meanwhile, the company ended its operations in France (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 Saga Sleep built a story-based Russian-language sleep app, which it decided to pivot away from following Russia's Ukraine invasion. In consequence, the startup lost 90 % of its revenue. But the founders Svitlana Björkman and Erik Björkman aren't giving up: With fresh funding announced in February, they created a new iOS kids sleeping app named Stella Sleep, which targets the US market (Swedish / DI Digital paywall).
- FLOX, Stockholm-based developer of drone-based technology for wildlife management, expanded its commercial phase to the US market and secured its first customer there (English).
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond
- Germany-based Vorwerk Ventures announced its new €150M ($150M) fund for early stage consumer tech startups in Europe (English, German).
- German VC firm Point Nine published the new version of its "SaaS Funding Napkin", outlining what it takes to raise capital in SaaS in 2022 (English).
- The Financial Times wrote a piece about the current turmoil in privat markets titled "Venture capital’s silent crash: when the tech boom met reality" (English / FT paywall, alternative URL).
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That's it for today.
