News November 23, 2022: Apotea, Occtoo, Infobaleen, Claims Carbon, Wolt, Brizo and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Apotea (Stockholm, online drugstore) is acquiring 50% of Norwegian competitor Apotera and around 10% of Finnish competitor Apomera. Financial terms were not disclosed (Swedish, machine translation).

Funding news

• Occtoo (Malmö, SaaS-based experience data platform): €4.6M ($4.7M) seed round led by Newion, with participation from previous investors 42CAP and Industrifonden (English, Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Infobaleen (Stockholm, AI-powered decision intelligence platform for retail and e-commerce companies): SEK17.9M (€1.6M, $1.7M) in a seed funding round from Spintop Ventures and existing investor Fort Knox, with participation from new CEO Linda Hellström and new Chief Customer Officer Anna Sundin. In 2021, Infobaleen generated net revenue of SEK4.3M – up from SEK2.9M the year before – and a profit of SEK329K, up from a negative result in 2020 (English, Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Claims Carbon (Stockholm, SaaS to help insurers reach net-zero in their entire value chain): €1.1M ($1.1M) seed round led by Vaens, with participation from BiG Start Ventures, Astorya.vc, Claesson & Anderzén, and business angels including Fredrik Bergström and Patrik Backman (English).
• In a follow-on investment, Icebreaker.vc participated in a $2M seed round raised by Estonia-headquartered influencer marketing software startup Modash (English).

>> 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

• Finnish last mile delivery platform Wolt is opening two new tech hubs, one of them in Stockholm (and the other one in Tel Aviv). The company plans to hire dozens of experts including software engineers, product managers, designers and data professionals for these hubs (English).
• Brizo, the newly launched Stockholm-based third-party same day logistics provider for brands, signed foodora as customer, which allows the Q-commerce giant to use Brizo's checkout solution and hyperlocal logistics facilities (Swedish, machine translation).
• Magnus Lundin is the new Stockholm-based head of the Scandinavian investment team at major European clean tech investor EIT InnoEnergy (English, Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Jonas Tannerstad, head of technical installations at municipal housing company ÖrebroBostäder, was named "AI Swede of the Year 2022" for his practical use of AI when it comes to energy and climate smart city planning (Swedish, machine translation).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Learning from an UX experiment ran by Duolingo: The power of good friction. "Good friction is friction we add to the experience that increases users’ motivation by getting them to actively assess their end goal" (English).
• Fancy a gloomy, cynical but possibly also at least partly true take on what's going on at startup tech conferences such as Slush? Here you go (English).
• What’s next for European banking-as-a-service (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• A gang criminal in Stockholm was sentenced for possession of a submachine gun which was largly created with a 3D printer (Swedish, machine translation).

+++

That's it for today.