News September 5, 2022: Ark Kapital, Stylee, Kry, Janne Wallenius, M, The Drop, Kognity and more

Martin Weigert -

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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Funding news

  • ArK Kapital (Stockholm, alternative lending provider for startups): €15M ($15M) in an "acceleration round" led by Swedish banking icon Annika Falkengren, with participation from all seed investors and new investors Upfin and Timo Soininen (English).
  • Stylee (Stockholm, platform for personal styling, inspiration and shopping): SEK2.5M (€230K, $230K) in a funding round that was raised during spring 2022, from angel investors such as Karolina Roslund, Daniel Soussan, Magnus Mivér, Arthur Engel and Olle Lundin (Swedish, machine translation).
  • In a follow-on investment, Creandum participated in a $12.2M Series B round raised by Hungarian writing and collaborating platform Craft (English).

>> 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

  • Kry's estimated valuation was cut in roughly half by the 2 US funds and main investors Capital Group and Fidelity, to SEK8.8B (€820M, $810M) and SEK10.9B respectively (Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).
  • Professor Janne Wallenius, researcher at KTH and co-founder and CTO at nuclear technology startup Leadcold, receives this year's KTH Innovation Award (English).
  • Volvo is going to rebrand its car sharing app M, which now has 250,000 registered users in Sweden, as Volvo On Demand (English).
  • On September 21, the new climate tech conference The Drop will bring together around 500 attendees from Sweden and abroad in Malmö. Aside from its climate focus, the event also seeks to put the spotlight on the startup ecosystem in southern Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).
  • Carl Vernersson is joining blq invest as new partner (English, Swedish).
  • 📺 Hugo Wernhoff, CEO & co-founder of Stockholm-based digital teaching and learning platform Kognity, talks about his decision to temporarily move to the US to expand the company there, how he did it, and challenges (English, 14 minutes).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

  • Sondo Capital is a new NOK180M (€18M, $18M) early stage fund launched by Kjetil Holmefjord and Henrik Hatlebrekke, which invests in pre-seed and seed stage teams with a link to Norway (Norwegian, machine translation).
  • A really freaky new type of human job brought to the world thanks to AI: "Professional AI whisperers" that sell highly fine-tuned text prompts for text-to-image generators (English).
  • Sweden and Finland step in with liquidity guarantees to avert Lehman-like situation for power companies (English).
  • During August 2022, wind energy generated in Sweden reached 1.91TWh, the highest August production of all time (English).
  • The available co-working space in sqm in the larger Stockholm area has grown by 22% since 2021. In Stockholm's central business district, 6.6% of all office space is utilized as co-working space (Swedish, machine translation).
  • Polestar and Citroen have settled a dispute over the company's logos that prevented the Swedish EV brand from selling in France (English).

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That's it for today.