News January 17, 2023: Vendre, MËTTA, Polarium, Einride, Candela, Fishbrain, Zimpler and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Vendre (Stockholm, e-commerce platform founded in 2007) is being acquired by Dutch order-to-delivery software group Optimizers. Financial terms were not disclosed (English, Swedish).

Funding news

• MËTTA (Stockholm, maker of a healthy and tasty meal replacement): SEK1M (€90K, $95K) from angel investors such as Tom Johansson (founder of Hooked Foods) and Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel. The round is ongoing and the company plans to raise SEK2M in total (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

• Polarium, Stockholm-based startup developing smart modular energy storage solutions, is for the first time installing its energy optimization system at a Swedish supermarket. It will be "one of the largest systems ever installed in a commercial building in Sweden". It allows the ICA Maxi Kungälv to save energy costs by buying energy when hourly rates are low, and even to generate revenue by feeding energy back to the grid when overall demand is high (English).
• Einride, Gothenburg-based autonomous all-electric transport provider, and its Series C investor Polar Structure plan to open 15 truck charging stations in Sweden this year, and 100 globally within 3 years (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish EV car maker Polestar is providing batteries to a new electric boat from Candela. This makes the Stockholm-based startup the first third-party company to receive Polestar batteries and charging systems (English).
• Fishbrain, Stockholm-based globally used fishing app, is laying off around 20 people (20% of the workforce) to get to profitability faster (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Through a new partnership between Klarna and the online second hand marketplace Tradera, users of the Klarna app in Sweden are now able to resell items purchased through Klarna almost fully automatically (Swedish, machine translation).
• Breakit's Stefan Lundell wants at least one female investor to be part of the investor panel of this year's Shift initiative, but writes that he so far hasn't succeeded in getting a commitment. He put out a last, urgent (and as he describes himself, "desperate") call (Swedish, machine translation).

Swedish tech earnings

• Zimpler (Stockholm, account-to-account payment solutions for merchants) grew sales by 227% during Q3 2022 from a year earlier, to €70M ($76M) on an annualized basis. The operating marging has improved drastically to around 50%. According to Di Digital, the company is floating these numbers to either raise a large round or to find an acquirer (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Climate tech companies globally raised over $40B across ~1,000 venture and growth deals in 2022. 2022 funding was 3% down from 2021’s peak, driven by a 24% drop in growth stage funding (English).
• Ways to think about investing in Generative AI in 2023 and beyond (English).
• The "Big Five" termsheet clauses can have a significant impact on both the economics and control aspects of a company (English).

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That's it for today.