News January 19, 2023: Passwordless.dev, SunRoof, Scrintal, Quritis, VOI, Dynamic Code, Lexly, teen social networks, Realheart and more

Martin Weigert -

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

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Mergers & acquisitions

  • Passwordless.dev (Malmö, provider of WebAuthn APIs to support secure password logins) was acquired by US-based open source password management platform Bitwarden. Financial terms were not disclosed. The service was founded by Anders Åberg, launched around 2 1/2 years ago and had not raised any external funding (English, Swedish).

Funding news

  • SunRoof (Stockholm, custom-engineered solar roofs): €13.5M ($14.6) extension round from a syndicate of European climate tech investors, including World Fund, Nordic Alpha Partners, and L&G Capital. The company will use the funds to drive its expansion plans across the Nordics, Germany as well as in the US (English, Swedish / Breakit paywall).
  • Scrintal (Stockholm, visual note-taking and collaboration tool): €1M ($1.1M) in a funding round led by Spintop Ventures, and joined by existing investor Icebreaker.vc (English).
  • Quritis (Stockholm, automated tool to help harden the security for cloud-based applications that run within containerized software, such as Docker): SEK3M (€270K, $290K) from angel investors Johan Qviberg, Simon Josefsson, Jimmy Lundström and Christopher Suarez (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
  • Trellis Road participated in a €1.2M ($1.3M) pre-seed round raised by German-Brazilian startup InPlanet. The company specializes in large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere through Enhanced Rock Weathering (English).
  • In a follow-on investment, Norrsken VC led a €2M ($2.2M) funding round raised by Estonian sustainable investment platform Grünfin (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

  • VNV Global, biggest investor in VOI, massively wrote down the valuation of the Swedish e-scooter company again, this time by 40% compared to Q3 2022, to SEK3.7B (€330M, $360M). This represents an EV/Revenue multiple of 3.3, down from 6.3 (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).
  • Dynamic Code, Linköping-based provider of end consumer health and diagnostic tests, is laying off around 20 employees and pausing its activities on the German market (Swedish, machine translation).
  • Last Monday I covered the launch of Swedish teen-focused, poll-based social networking app LYCKLI. The sector appears to be hot: Earlier this week Discord announced having acquired US-based social app Gas, which LYCKLI clearly was inspired by (one more Swedish clone). Today, the reportedly fast growing Germany-based compliments app for teens Slay announced a €2.5M pre-seed funding round led by Accel.
  • Lexly, Stockholm-based provider of online legal services, is launching in Norway (Swedish, machine translation).
  • Realheart, publicly listed Västerås-based medtech company, and KTH have developed a patient simulator to test the algorithm that controls the company's artificial heart (English).
  • Spotify and a group of European companies are calling on the European Commission to take “swift and decisive action” against Apple over what they describe as anti-competitive practices that have hampered their businesses (English).

Swedish tech earnings

  • VNV Global (Stockholm, investment company) published its Q4 2022 interim report (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

  • Sequoia Capital launched a $195M dedicated seed fund, its fifth. The vehicle will be used to back founders across the United States and Europe (English).
  • Last year, US startups with all-women teams received 1.9% of venture capital invested. That's down from 2.4% in 2021. Mixed teams raised 17.2% of the funding (English). That's bad but outperforms Sweden significantly nevertheless.
  • How to explain a (potentially complicated sounding) startup idea to investors in the best possible way, that’s super easy to understand (English).

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That's it for today.