News November 21, 2022: HPSolartech, Dib Travel, Kivra and more

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

A slow news day today (instead, very snowy in parts of Sweden).

Funding news

• HPSolartech (Uppsala; develops, builds, sells and operates solar farms): close to SEK2B (€180M, $186M) in a mix of equity and debt funding, from French investment company Omnes Capital, which thereby becomes the majority owner. According to HPSolartech CEO Kenny Fogel, capital raises of – in total – between SEK5B–SEB7B will be required to execute on the company's growth plan, which includes producing 10%-15% of all solar power in Sweden by 2028 (English, Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2).
• Dib Travel (Stockholm, travel booking solution for corporate travel): SEK60M (€5.5M, $5.6M) from Trill Invest. The post-money valuation landed at around SEK110M, according to calculations made by Di Digital (Swedish / DI Digital paywall).

>> 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

• Henrik Lönnevi will become new CEO of Sweden's leading digital mailbox service Kivra. Current CEO Anna Bäck announced in September that she will step down within a year (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• "Embrace Risk" is a new free newsletter launched by Sweden-based software engineer Kontantinos Livieratos, about topics such as automation, reliability engineering practices and culture, scalability, availability and incidents (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• A startup with links to the Russian tech scene won Slush's startup pitch competition. This sparked lots of criticism, which today led the event organizers and the VC pitch judges to revoke the win (English).
• "Down rounds have less to do with founders embarrassment asking to be saved and are more of a investors’ pragmatic calculation of a portfolio performance over helping startup founders out" (English).
• Insightful post-mortem from Californian startup Kite. Since 2014 it worked on a solution that helped developers write code using AI, but is now shutting down. One reason cited by Kite's founder: "Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Their manager might, but engineering managers only want to pay for discrete new capabilities, i.e. making their developers 18% faster when writing code did not resonate strongly enough" (English).

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That's it for today.