News March 25, 2022: Ella, Ekobot, Carl Pei, Teenage Engineering and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector.

Financing rounds

• Ella (Stockholm, upcoming digital healthcare app for women during and after pregnancy): SEK10.5M (€1M, $1.1M) from Add Health Media and angel investors Joo Emmy Sundström, Ninke Liebert, Anders F. Börjesson, Monika Lindquist, Johan Hasselblad, and Louise Engwall Edholm (English, Swedish).
• Creandum participated in a $60M Series A round raised by German startup Leapsome, a platform for performance management and employee engagement (English).

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News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Ekobot, a publicly listed Västerås-based startup developing autonomous tools for precision agriculture, signed a deal with one of Sweden's major vegetable farmers. The company describes the order as its "commercial breakthrough" (Swedish, machine translation).
• Spotify paid out over $7B to artists, labels, and the other moving pieces of the music industry last year, up from $5B in 2020, according to its 2021 royalty report (English).
• Wired writes about Swedish entrepreneur Carl Pei's plan to once more start a smartphone revolution (with London-based Nothing), together with Stockholm-based Teenage Engineering (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• EU ushers in brave new world of Big Tech regulation (English).
• Fintech "has been eating up the money" (English / Sifted paywall, alternative URL):

Other interesting things from Sweden

• 678 Swedish volunteer fighters are known to participate in Ukraine's military defense against Putin's invasion (Swedish, no machine translation available).
• Ukrainian President Zelenskyy spoke to the Swedish Parliament on Thursday (English).

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That's it for today.