News July 11, 2022: Klarna, Qiwio, Quartr, Mycorena, Gordon Delivery, Kinnevik and more
Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector.
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Or, if you prefer a free weekly newsletter, subscribe to Swedish Tech Weekly!
Funding news
- Klarna (Stockholm, payments & shopping provider): $800M at a post-money valuation of $6.7B from new investors Mubadala and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) as well as existing investors including Sequoia, Bestseller, Silver Lake, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In its press release, the company describes the current markt situation as "possibly the worst set of circumstances to afflict stock markets since World War II" (English). In a couple of tweets, CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski commented on the funding and noted some "facts that the media might omit in reporting on this" (English).
- Qiwio (Halmstad, SaaS platform for interactive 'shoppable' videos & photos): SEK5.6M (€520K, $530K) from undisclosed investors (Swedish, no machine translation available).
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News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs
- Quartr, Gothenburg-based investor relations app, launched a feature to search through transcripts of public companies' conference calls (English).
- Gothenburg-based foodtech startup Mycorena says it has successfully developed a prototype for fungi-based butter (English).
- Gordon Delivery, Stockholm-based smart urban logistics provider for food home deliveries, is expanding into the UK. Last year, the company increased revenue by 200% to SEK411M (€38M, $39M), and generated an EBITDA of SEK22M (Swedish, machine translation).
Swedish tech earnings reports
- Kinnevik released its latest quarterly report. The Stockholm-based investment company wrote down the value of its ownership in each unlisted startup and scaleup by 30% (Swedish, machine translation).
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world
- French VC firm Quantonation launched the first European fund which focuses solely on quantum startups, with €91M ($92M) to deploy (English).
- Many tech brands change their logos and look like everyone else (English)
Other interesting things related to Sweden
- A team from Gothenburg's Chalmers University of Technology is developing a fully autonomous drone system that can increase the efficiency and speed of response in rescue operations at sea, with a focus on refugees traveling on fragile or overloaded vessels (English).
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That's it for today.