News December 20, 2022: Albert, RE:OCEAN, Moving Floor, Sightic, Chassis Autonomy, EmbeDL, Skawen, Arboair and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Albert (publ) (Gothenburg, digital learning subscription service for kids and teens) acquired the 2 Swedish startups Strawbees and Film och Skola, as well as the French edtech company Kids MBA, for at total of SEK160M (€14.5M, $15.4M) in a mix of stock and cash. In order to raise the cash portion, Albert completed a directed share issue, see below (English, Swedish).

Funding news

• RE:OCEAN (Säffle, developer of a sustainable land-based fish farm to produce Sweden’s favourite fish — salmon): SEK530M (€48M, $51M) in debt funding from the EU climate bank, part of the EIB (English).
• Albert (publ) (Gothenburg, digital learning subscription service for kids and teens): SEK70M (€6.3M, $6.7M) through a directed share issue from new and existing shareholders, including Schibsted, Consensus Asset Management and RoosGruppen (English).
• Moving Floor (Visby, automatic and digital cleaning solution for farm buildings): SEK40M (€3.6M, $3.8M) from Bjäre Invest and FAM for the industrialization of the products and the international expansion (Swedish, machine translation).
• CYTO365 (Höganäs, medtech startup manufacturing a medical stopcock manifold that prevents mixing of drugs): €2M ($2.1M) in equity funding and €1.9M ($2M) grant from EIC Accelerator (English).
• Sightic, formerly Eyescanner (Gothenburg, AI-based software for drug testing): €2.5M ($2.7M) grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) (English).
• Chassis Autonomy (Trollhättan, developer of automotive fail-operational actuation systems): €2.5M ($2.7M) grant from EIC Accelerator. The EIC has also committed to an equity investment of €4M to be matched by a private or corporate investor (English).
• EmbeDL (Gothenburg, helping customers embed deep learning-based artificial intelligence in embedded systems): €2.5M ($2.7M) grant from EIC Accelerator (English).
• Skawen (Stockholm, ventilation startup developing, producing and selling AHU's): undisclosed amount from previous investors including Skawen’s Chairman Lars Save (former founder of Bisnode and Addnode), and Green Group (English).

>> 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

• Creandum shared key findings of its founder salary survey which it conducted together with Slush. The results are based on responses from 650 entrepreneurs across 47 European cities (English). The firm also used the data to build a Compensation Calculator.
• Gothenburg-based foodtech startup Mycorena, which specializes in fungi-based proteins, has so far raised SEK250M (€22.6M, $24M). It's using the funding to build its first commercial factory due to be opened in 2023, and is also experimenting with 3d printing of food (Swedish, no machine translation available).
• Profile of Linköping-based startup Arboair founded by Markus Drugge and Jacob Hjalmarsson. The duo and their team has developed a SaaS solution that uses AI-driven image analysis to produce decision-making data for forest owners (Swedish, machine translation).
• Stepler, Karlstad-based rewards app for walking, says it reached almost half a million users in the two new markets Spain and Italy within a few months after launching there (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Dutch VC firm FORWARD.one announced that it has closed its Fund II at €145M, for investments in product-focused high-tech and deep-tech businesses in the Nordics, Germany, and the Netherlands (English).
• How founders should think about cash management (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Due to the high energy prices, Norway's GDP was – for the first time ever – larger than Sweden's during a quarter (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.