News December 13, 2022: Sana, Brink Commerce, digip, VoiceDiagnostic, CAKE, Apohem, Imbox, Sting, CapSek and more

Here are today's news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, exclusively for subscribers of Swedish Tech News.

Funding news

• Sana (I'm dropping the "Labs" from the name as the company seems to be doing as well) (Stockholm, AI-based personalized learning platform) confirmed the $34M Series B round covered last week (and first reported by Breakit). It was led by Silicon Valley VC firm Menlo Ventures. Previous investor EQT Ventures and 25 angel investors also joined the round. The funding was raised at a post-money valuation of SEK2B (€180M, $190M) – 4 times higher than when the company raised its Series A in January 2021. Reportedly, the round closed within only 2 weeks and grew bigger than initially planned (English, Swedish).
• Brink Commerce (Stockholm, headless e-commerce SaaS platform): SEK20M (€1.8M, $1.9M) convertible debt from undisclosed investors. During spring 2023, the company plans to raise between SEK100M and SEK200M for the international expansion (Swedish / Breakit paywall).  
• digip (Stockholm, digital solution for brand protection): €1.2M ($1.3M) extension of the €2M seed round announced in June 2021. The fresh funding was raised from existing investors, including Industrifonden and Seed X Liechtenstein (English).
• VoiceDiagnostic (Lund, digital voice training service): SEK1.25M (€115K, $120K) in a bridge round from new investor Sparbanksstiftelsen Skånes Rikskapitalstiftelse and existing shareholder LU Holding. Additionally, the startup secured a SEK500K loan from Almi (Swedish, machine translation).

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

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• CAKE, Stockholm-based electric motorcycle startup, has unveiled Kibb, an semi-autonomous electric all-terrain vehicle, "designed to respect the land's biodiversity and agricultural challenges for delicate ecosystems". The company aims for a market introduction in 2025 (English).
• Swedish online pharmacy Apohem, which currentlys ranks third in Sweden by market share, says it's the first in the country (and "possibly even in the world") to launch a free, video-based service through which customers can get help and advice from pharmacists – regardless of if they actually make a purchase. The technology is provided by Gothenburg-based customer relations SaaS scaleup Imbox (Swedish, machine translation).
• Sting is part of a consortium that includes three other organizations, that won a €8.5M contract to run the European Commission's new space startup accelerator program CASSINI (English, Swedish).

Swedish tech earnings

• Northern CapSek Ventures (publ) (Gothenburg, tech-focused investment company) published its Q3 2022 interim report (Swedish / PDF).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Austria-based VC firm Speedinvest has announced a raise of €500M, to continue investing in European startups at the pre-seed and seed-stage (English).
• Seedsummit is the "first and only international full-stack legal hub for early-stage founders", founded by Seedcamp in partnership with law firms and many European VCs. Initially, five jurisdictions are supported (UK, France, Portugal, Denmark, and Germany), with more to come (English).
• UK-based payment platform Checkout.com has reportedly reduced its internal valuation from $40B to around $11B (English).
• The scourge of job-title inflation (English / The Economist paywall, alternative URL).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Synsimulator is a new mobile app launched by the National Swedish Association for the Visually Impaired (based on a version first created in Norway), which simulates the most common eye diseases (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.