News August 29, 2022: Tencent, Foodrunners, TikTok, Meds, Charge Amps, M.O.B.A. network, Opter, method for revenue prediction 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!
Mergers & acquisitions
- In 2021, Chinese tech giant Tencent reportedly bought 44% of Stockholm-based game studio Fall Damage, for SEK20M (€1.9M, $1.9M) (Swedish / DI Digital paywall).
Funding news
- Luminar Ventures led a €2.5M ($2.5M) seed round raised by Denmark-based cybersecurity platform Muninn (English).
>> 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
- Foodrunners is a bootstrapped Stockholm-based startup founded in 2020 by Michael Kärrberg and Andreas Johansson that recently launched a mobile app to compare prices for grocery items a different stores, thus competing with the pioneer in this sector, Matpriskollen (Swedish / Market.se paywall).
- Henrik Landgren, co-founder and CPTO of ArK Kapital, and 4 data scientists from EQT (where Landgren worked previously), published a research paper about a method to do fine-grained revenue predictions into the future based on very little data (English).
- TikTok is allegedly avoiding paying taxes on revenues generated in Sweden by invoicing advertisers through companies based abroad (Swedish / SvD paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).
- Meds, Stockholm-based online pharmacy, is postponing its planned direct listing at the Nasdaq First North Growth Market by 1 month, to gain more time to "inform the market". The listing is now expected to take place in early October (Swedish, machine translation).
Swedish tech earnings reports
- Charge Amps (Stockholm, manufacturer of smart charging solutions for electric vehicles): English.
- M.O.B.A. Network (Stockholm, acquires, develops and operates gaming communities for the global gaming market): English.
- Esmaeilzadeh Holding (Stockholm, investment company): English.
- Opter (Stockholm, SaaS solution for smarter transport planning): Swedish, machine translation.
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond
- So far in August, European venture capital investment is down 73% vs. July and down 82% vs. June, according to (preliminary) data from Dealroom. This would mark a harsher slowdown than what's typical for August (English).
- Facebook's former mantra "move fast and break things" has gone a bit out of fashion lately due to undesirable "side effects". But moving fast is still crucial for startups. Here are some key lessons about how Facebook optimized for speed at an early stage, from former engineer Aditya Agarwal (who left the company in 2011) Â (English).
Other interesting things related to Sweden
- The Swedish island of Gotland arranged an "ugliest lawn" contest to promote its water conservation efforts and change social norms (English).
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That's it for today.
