News May 3, 2022: Polarium, Quickbit, Sesamy, Techarenan Challenge, Qliro and more
Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, exclusively for subscribers of Swedish Tech News.
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Subscribe to Swedish Tech News to get access to a daily newsletter that brings you a brief overview of news from the Swedish startup & tech sector, curated by Martin Weigert.
Or, if you prefer a free weekly newsletter, subscribe to Swedish Tech Weekly!
Funding news
- Polarium (Stockholm, smart modular energy storage solutions): SEK955M (€91M, $100M) from AMF, at a valuation of $1B. "This year, we are making the company IPO-ready", says founder and CEO Stefan Jansson to DI Digital (English, Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2).
>> Daily updated, subscriber-exclusive Google sheet with all funding rounds raised by private Swedish startups and scaleups. Request access.
News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs
- Stockholm-based crypto exchange Quickbit announced being the first Swedish crypto company to offer a debit card in Sweden, by releasing the Visa-powered Quickbit Card (English, Swedish).
- Sesamy, the Acast founders' subscription-free e-book and audiobook startup, is expanding into podcasts (Swedish, machine translation).
- Spotify becomes the first music streaming brand to have an official presence within Roblox, with the launch of “Spotify Island" (English).
- The applications for the annual entrepreneurial competition Techarenan Challenge 2022 are open to startups and scaleups from the Nordics (English).
Swedish tech earnings reports
- Qliro (Stockholm, payments solution for e-commerce and financial services provider for consumers): English.
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond
- Facebook is pulling out of podcasts and plans to remove them altogether from the social-media service starting June 3 (English).
- A new tribe of European startups is bringing buy now, pay later (BNPL) to businesses (English / Sifted paywall, alternative URL).
Other interesting things from Sweden
- A single sell order trade by Citigroup caused a brief flash crash in Nordic stock markets on Monday. The Stockholm OMX 30 equity benchmark index was one of the hardest hit, falling by 8% at one point following a five-minute dive (English).
- 6,736,332 people living in Sweden reported their taxes digitally this year, an increase of 85,000 compared to last year. 433,191 tax indivduals used the paper forms (Swedish, machine translation).
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That's it for today.
