News January 31, 2022: Alva Labs, Corite, Aligned Bio, PU sensor, Uniti, Budbee, Norrsken22 and more

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

Financing rounds

• Alva Labs (Stockholm, data-driven recruitment tool): €11.7M ($13M) in a funding round led by VNV Global, for the expansion into the UK (English).
• Corite (Stockholm, platform for crowdinvesting in music artists): $6.2M in a private token sale for its blockchain-based sister project, Corite CO (English).
• Aligned Bio (Lund, advanced nanowire technology for the biomedical industry): €2.3M ($2.6M) from the EIC Accelerator program (English).
• PU sensor (Linköping, sensor technology to reduce the occurrence of pressure ulcers): SEK10M (€1M, $1.1M) from undisclosed investors (Swedish, machine translation).

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Uniti, the previously hyped but now crisis-stricken Lund-based electric car startup, rebranded a Chinese low-cost EV which looked nothing like Uniti's futuristic prototypes (English / The Local paywall, alternative URL, Swedish).
• Anton Holmquist, co-founder of Stockholm-based subscription service for fitness studios Bruce, has died at the age of only 36 years (Swedish, machine translation).
• Budbee, Stockholm-based last-mile logistics provider for e-commerce, generated SEK835M (€83M, $90M) in revenue last year, which is twice as much as in 2020 (Swedish, machine translation).
• Norrsken22 is the name of a new fund targeted at African startups, initiated by the Stockholm-based Norrsken Foundation, together with 30 unicorn founders and a couple of venture capital and private equity investors. $110M have already been raised, out of an expected total of $200M (English).
• The latest from the headline-generating conflict about covid misinformation surrounding Joe Rogan's podcast on Spotify: The company says it will add a content advisory to podcasts about the coronavirus pandemic, and Rogan apologizes (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• A small survey among some European investors about how they see the current climate in the private market (English).
• Revenue-based financing has become a new source of funding for entrepreneurs that don’t want to dilute current investors (English).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• Recently, Caroline Farberger joined Swedish VC firm and venture builder Wellstreet as new partner and working chair. In her previous role as CEO of Swedish insurance company ICA, she became the first company leader in Sweden to publicly come out as transgender (English).
• Huawei takes Sweden to court after the country banned the Chinese tech giant’s 5G products (English).

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That's it for today.