Swedish Tech Weekly #240
Welcome to the latest from Sweden's startup & tech sector.
I'm Martin Weigert. Swedish Tech Weekly brings you a selection of some of the news I covered in my daily newsletters last week. Today's email is being sent to 2202 subscribers (+11).
Mergers & acquisitions
• Pagero, publicly traded Gothenburg-based global network for automated business transactions, received acquisition offers from three North American companies (English).
• Lime Technologies, Lund-headquartered publicly traded CRM software company, acquires an 85% stake in SportAdmin, a Malmö-based SaaS platform for sports teams, for SEK149M (€13M, $14.5M) (English).
• The bankruptcy estate of Malmö-based maker of electric boards for water sports Radinn was acquired by its Stockholm-based competitor Awake (Swedish / Rapidus paywall).
• Monterro, Swedish software growth investor, is acquiring the majority of the shares in the Danish AI platform AG Analytics (English).
Funding news
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• NA-KD (Gothenburg, online fashion retailer): SEK170M (€15M, $16.6M) in a mix of equity funding led by existing investor Quadrille, and debt funding from Triple Point (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).
• Altris (Uppsala, developer of sustainable sodium-ion batteries): SEK77M (€6.9M, $7.5M) grant from the Swedish Energy Agency (English).
• ZIGRID (Jönköping; technology for capturing industrial, low-grade waste heat and converting it into new energy): €2.5M ($2.7M) grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) (English).
• Lignin Industries, formerly RenCom (greater Uppsala area, technology for refining forest lignin to bioplastic): SEK25M (€2.2M, $2.4M) from existing investors and the company's CEO Fredrik Malmfors (English).
• Swiftcourt (Malmö, solutions for safe and smooth peer-to-peer-transactions): €2M in a seed funding round led by XVC Tech (English).
• n-Ink (Norrköping, developer of leading inks for applications in printed electronics): €1M ($1.1M) convertible note from Voima Ventures (English).
• Colivia (Stockholm, digital matching platform for healthcare professionals to find suitable assignments): SEK11M (€1M, $1.1M) from undisclosed investors (Swedish, machine translation).
• Goodfeed (Gothenburg, SaaS tool for project feedback): SEK5.2M (€470K, $520K) in a funding round led by Friends Capital, with participation from RadCap, among others (English / Swedish Tech News Jan 4).
• Gympak (Helsingborg; provider of sportswear packs, in-room training equipment & workout apps for hotels, resorts & gyms): SEK4M (€360K, $390K) from Aspire Ventures and private investors, in a first funding round (English / Swedish Tech News Jan 9).
• Precode.ai (Stockholm, solution for "writing software specifications in minutes"): €150K ($160K) in pre-seed funding from Antler (English / Swedish Tech News Jan 11).
• Blue Cromos (Malmö, next-generation brand protection platform): SEK1.3M (€120K, $130K) grant from Vinnova, to build a commercial infrastructure for managing the data for Digital product passports (DPP) (English).
• ISOREA (Stockholm, blood test for detecting risk of Alzheimer’s disease): undisclosed amount in pre-seed funding through a convertible note from Linnéa Capital (English).
• EQT Ventures led a $100M Series B funding round raised by the OpenAI-backed Norwegian AI startup 1X, which is developing humanoid robots "to meet the world’s labor demands" (English).
• Norrsken Accelerator participated in a £950K pre-seed funding round raised by UK-based startup Furbnow, which offers an all-in-one-service to make homes more energy efficient (English).
I covered 8 additional rounds, as well as more details, in my daily newsletters last week.
News from Swedish startups & the tech sector
• TravelTail, founded last year and based in Stockholm, launched its online booking platform for personalized pet-friendly travel (English / Swedish Tech News Jan 11).
• LogSpend is a new Stockholm-based startup founded by the two former Spotify engineers Victor Chima and Boina Babu, developing an analytics platform for generative AI. The company participated in the Techstars Berlin autumn 2023 class (English).
• Norditech, an AI startup from Huskvarna that emerged from an IT consultancy, has introduced STELLA, an "easily configurable, open-source Multi-Agent AI Framework for conversational agents" (English).
• Curest, Luleå-based startup developing digital and VR-based solutions for physical therapy, signed the French healthcare giant Ramsay Santé as customer, following a successful pilot (Swedish, machine translation).
• Learning to Sleep, the publicly traded CBT-based digital sleep treatment solution from Malmö, is bankrupt. (Swedish, machine translation).
• Charly, Stockholm-based fintech founded in 2022 that began with a digital family equity insurance, has now launched a SaaS product for companies, aimed at reducing the financial gender gap among working parents (English / Swedish Tech News Jan 12).
• Teenage Engineering, the Stockholm-based maker of (audio) hardware products, designed the hardware for the U.S. startup rabbit, which last week launched its $200 "pocket AI device". It sold out its first two batches of 10,000 units each in two days (English).
• Climate Hero, a bootstrapped Stockholm-based startup that offers carbon footprint calculation solutions for consumers and businesses, reached the one million user milestone (Swedish / Impact Loop paywall).
• Freja eID, publicly traded Stockholm-based electronic ID provider, also announced passing the one million user milestone (Swedish, machine translation).
• Preggers, Stockholm-made pregnancy app, has reached the No. 1 position in 20 countries across the world, according to a LinkedIn post (English).
• Natural Cycles received approval from Health Canada to market and sell its app as a form of birth control, as first of its kind in the country (English).
• Ingrid Capacity, the two year old Stockholm-based energy storage infrastructure provider, is unusual in that it does not make its founders the face of the company (English).
• Curoflow, Stockholm-based white label telemedicine platform founded as "Remisshjälpen", is expanding into the Spanish market – the startup's fourth market (English).
• Breakit profiles the bootstrapping success story of Bryntum, Stockholm-headquartered software scaleup founded in 2009, and its founder Mats Bryntse (Swedish, machine translation).
• PitchDoctor, a London-based startup founded by former Stockholm-based VC Tunde Adakeye, built an AI coach for founders that listens to VC meetings and analyses what went right and wrong (English).
• DoorDash-owned last mile delivery platform Wolt is following its competitor foodora and launches 24/7 delivery of restaurant meals (and potentially groceries) in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Örebro (Swedish, machine translation).
• The application for the KTH innovation pre-incubator spring batch 2024 is open until February 20.
• Sweden's new major tech conference The Tech Arena announced new keynote speakers Al Gore (former US Vice President) and Jessica Meir (NASA Astronaut) (English).
• Arlon den Teuling, formerly CEO of Skåne Startups, co-founded Malcon Invest, which aims to "get more investors around the globe to see what cool companies" exist in the Öresund region (English).
• Swedish VC Bodil Sidén joins the new Danish foodtech VC fund Kost Capital as General Partner (English).
• Nordic VC firm byFounders published its annual report on Pre-Seed to Series A technology startups and VC across the Nordics and Baltics (English).
I covered many additional news, as well as more details, in my daily newsletters last week.
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond
• The Norwegian VC Sandwater announced the final close of its early-stage venture fund at NOK1.4B (€120M, $135M) (English).
• Kjetil Holmefjord reviews Norway's tech startup funding trends of 2023 (English).
• "Founder laundry is an ability that a small number of funds have which automatically endows any founder they have invested in with an extremely powerful halo effect" (English).
• A survey of 9,388 software engineers shows that ~90% believe getting a job now is harder than pre-pandemic. More than 60% believe AI will lead to less hiring (English).
• "Enshittification" was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by author Cory Doctorow to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse (English).
• Eric Ries, the American author of The Lean Startup, created a GPT for paying ChatGPT Plus users that gives advice based on the learn startup principles.
Other interesting things related to Sweden
• Sweden was the EU country that used the most renewable energy in 2022 (English).
• Sweden ranks on a shared second spot in the latest ranking of the most powerful passports (English).
• A warning to Swedes from two top defence officials to prepare for war has prompted concern and accusations of alarmism (English).
• In Sweden teletext is still going strong (English).
• Tågtavlan is a GPT for ChatGPT Plus subscribers that provides Swedish train timetable information in real-time (Swedish).
• Sweden's 100 best hamburger restaurants in 2024, according to burger review site Burgerdudes (Swedish, machine translation).
• Stockholm's 10 best Italian restaurants, based on aggregated reviews from several platforms (Swedish, machine translation).
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Martin