News December 9, 2022: Housecar, Sally R, Neo4J, IamIP, Zimpler and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Housecar (Uppsala, sharing platform for motorhomes) was acquired by Swiss competitor Mycamper. Financial terms were not disclosed. The brand Housecar is being phased out. The acquistion follows a strategic investment by Mycamper in Housecar which was announced in May 2021 (English / Swedish).

Funding news

• Sally R (Västerås, cloud-based optimization of HVAC systems for energy efficiency): €1.1M ($1.2M) seed funding from new and existing investors. The round was led by Ebbefos Holding. The funds will be used to scale up energy-saving SaaS in the commercial property sector (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

• According to a Hacker News discussion thread, Malmö-founded, Silicon-Valley based graph database firm Neo4j just laid off 10% of its staff. Other information bits shared by commentators also don't sound too positive about the state of the company, although it's hard to judge their substance (English).
• IamIP, Stockholm-based patent search & monitoring platform, announced a new feature called "smart monitoring", which utilizes AI to search through millions of patents and automatically identify relevant documents. According to the company, this allows for time savings of 70% when monitoring patents (Swedish, machine translation).
• Zimpler, Stockholm-based provider of account-to-account payment solutions for merchants, is facing criticism for offering its service to gambling websites that lack a Swedish gambling license. The company defends itself by noting that those sites don't target users in Sweden (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).
• Spotify published its 2022 podcast trends report (English).
• Volvo Cars opened its new tech hub in downtown Stockholm this week (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Major consolidation in the rapid grocery delivery space: Getir acquires German competitor Gorillas in a $1.2B deal. 14 months ago, when Gorillas raised $1B, it held a $3B valuation (English).
• Founder advice on first-time fundraising (English).
• Generative AI might just save Venture Capital (English).
• AI's “capability overhang”: "For years, researchers have been on a tear, pumping out new models faster than they can be commercialized. But in 2022, a glut of new apps and programs have suddenly made these skills available to a general audience, and in 2023, as we continue scaling this new territory, things will start changing — fast" (English).
• Insightful piece by Kevin Kelly on what AI-generated art means for human creativity: "It's a team sport: The human artist and the machine artist are a duet" (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Sonos and IKEA announced the latest addition to their collaborative Symfonisk product lineup: a floor-standing lamp speaker. It will be available from January (English).
• Swedish prime minister urges energy restraint to prevent shortages (English).
• Ericsson and Apple end patent-related legal row with license deal (English).

+++

That's it for today.