Swedish Tech Weekly #242

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 PRO newsletters last week. Today's email is being sent to 2224 subscribers (+11).

Mergers & acquisitions

• Metry (Gothenburg, energy data platform for property owners) is being acquired by UK-based company EVORA Global (English)

• C-Resiliens (Stockholm, cybersecurity provider) is acquiring the Swedish industry peer West Code (English).

• Urb-it, the Stockholm-based sustainable logistics platform which was declared bankrupt in December, has been acquired by UK-based competitor Fin (English).

• Challengermode (Stockholm, esports platform) acquired the assets of its Swedish competitor Stryda (formerly G-Loot), which went bankrupt in December (Swedish, machine translation).

Funding news

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• H2 Green Steel (Stockholm, developer of a fossil-free steel plant being built in northern Sweden): €4.75B ($5.2B) mostly in debt financing, with €300M being equity funding from new investors including Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and existing investors. €250M represent a grant from the EU Innovation Fund. H2 Green Steel has now secured total funding of close to €6.5B (English).

• Cold Lake (greater Åre area; first of its kind, vertically integrated on-land production of Arctic char): €28M ($30M) loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) (English).

• Acorai (Helsingborg, device for heart failure management through non-invasive intracardiac pressure monitoring): $4.5M in a seed funding round led by Solardis Health Ventures (English).

• Qvalia (Stockholm, platform for finance teams to automate processes): €4M ($4.4M) in a funding round led by new investor Stella Capital, with participation from existing investor Spiltan Invest (English).

• Orbi (Gothenburg, app for making student life better): SEK10M (€880K, $960) mostly from existing investors, with participation from employees (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Phoenix Biopower (Stockholm, developer of a biomass-fired power generation system): SEK5.5M (€480K, $530K) convertible note from existing investors (English).

• Tengai (Malmö, AI-based interview screening solution): SEK5M (€440K, $480K) from existing investors. ➡️ First covered on Jan 17 in my PRO subscription.

• Homito (Stockholm, upcoming digital security solution for landlords and tenants): SEK4.8M (€420K, $460K) in first funding raised from Levels (English).

• PryvX (Stockholm, privacy preserving collaboration platform addressing cybercrime): €150K ($164K) in pre-seed funding from Antler. ➡️ First covered on Jan 17 in my PRO subscription.

• Kivra (Stockholm, digital mailbox service): undisclosed amount from the Swedish bank SEB, as part of a strategic partnership announced last week (Swedish, machine translation).

• EQT Ventures led a €15M Series A round raised by German digital packaging marketplace Packmatic (English).

I covered 11 additional rounds, as well as more details, in my PRO newsletters last week.

News from Swedish startups & the tech sector

• Klarna may soon go public in the US (English). Meanwhile, the company launched a monthly subscription named "Klarna Plus" for $7.99 in the US (English).

• Carl-Magnus Norden, the founder of Stockholm-founded Volta Trucks, has together with several former Volta execs founded the Stockholm- and Paris-based company Decade Energy, a "turnkey electrification partner for logistics operators and depot managers".

• Gilion, formerly ArK Kapital, continues transforming itself, from being solely an "alternative lending provider for startups", to a growth platform for founders, encompassing financing, forecasting, and insights. A new feature named "Decks" lets founders curate a custom set of metrics, and share it selectively to their teams, investors or partners (English).

• CheckWatt, Stockholm-based provider of smart, sustainable energy services, tells Breakit that revenue in 2023 exploded, growing 10x to "over SEK100M" (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Altered, Stockholm-based developer of high-end water saving solutions, signed a deal with India’s biggest airline IndiGo, to retrofit the entire fleet of 358 aircraft with Altered's noozles (English).

• Storytel, publicly traded Stockholm-based audiobook and ebook subscription service, is reducing its workforce by approximately 80 people, or 13% (English).

• Sleep Cycle, publicly traded company offering a sleep tracking solution, will close its Stockholm office and consolidate all employees at the headquarter in Gothenburg (English).

• GardenR, Lund-based mobile app for gardening, will close down. The Stockholm-based competitor Oh!Garden, is taking over GardenR's 40,000 users, according to a LinkedIn post by Oh!Garden founder and CEO Anna Dymling (Swedish / only visible for logged in LinkedIn users).

• Dagens industri published a profile of Patrik Liu Tran, the co-founder and CEO of Stockholm-based data quality platform Validio, which in summer 2022 raised a $15M seed round (Swedish, machine translation).

• EQL, bootstrapped Gothenburg-based startup offering a stock market information and trading app, has reached 75K users so far – entirely organically, says co-founder and CEO Sahng Ibrahim (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Piffl, Gothenburg-based shared platform for practicing playful and spontaneous activities, is expanding its solution to also include access to firewood along hiking trails (English).

• Seedrs, London-headquartered European equity crowdfunding platform, is laying off 15% of its staff and closes its office in Sweden (English).

• The applications for the Norrsken Accelerator 2024 are open.

• After selling her startup Grace Health, Swedish entrepreneur Thérèse Mannheimer is joining Danish early-stage VC People Ventures as Stockholm-based Venture Partner (English).

• Expansion Ventures is a new Stockholm- and Paris-based deeptech fund for New Space and New Air Mobility, backing startups from pre-seed to Series B. So far €100M have been raised, with the final target being €300M (English / PDF, Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Feminvest, Stockholm-based female network focusing on female ownership and influence on the financial markets, aims to raise a SEK100M (€8.8M) fund to invest in Nordic early-stage tech startups which are majority owned by women. A third of the money has been secured so far (English).

• UK-based VC firm Smedvig Capital, investor in Swedish tech companies Minut and Mavenoid, has closed a new €115M fund targeting B2B startups across Europe, with a focus on the UK, Nordics and Benelux (English).

• 🎧 Dagens Tech is a new daily(ish) podcast launched by Swedish VC veteran and former journalist Richard Sandenskog, in which he talks with the people that shape Sweden's tech sector.

PRO subscribers last week also read about these things (among others), which have not been covered elsewhere:

• A new Stockholm-based fintech raised so far unannounced pre-seed funding led by a Nordic VC firm.

• A Swedish startup developing technology for indoor agriculture raised funding from a Norway-based investor.

• 11 new Swedish tech startups, including a trading platform for secondaries in unlisted Swedish companies, and a climate tech company specializing in carbon negative power plants.

• A two year old Swedish startup, which wants to help artists and venues measure and document their climate impact, emerged from stealth.

• A pivot by a Swedish startup founded by an industry veteran.

• Bankruptcy of a SaaS solution for carbon removal and climate work.

• An under-the-radar Swedish fintech scaleup which reported around SEK30M in profit on roughly SEK100M in revenue for 2022, became majority-owned by a Swedish PE firm in 2023 – completely unnoticed.

• A bootstrapped Swedish platform for launching and operating automated stores, grew revenue by 148% YoY.

Join PRO, if you are an investor, analyst, or a sales exec, who appreciates having an information advantage.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Apple has announced major changes to its app ecosystem in the European Union to comply with the Digital Markets Act (English). Spotify's response: "Extortion!" (English).

• This year's Slush conference will take place on Nov 20-21, as usual in the Finnish capital Helsinki. Tickets can now be pre-registered (English).

• A Creandum template for founders to use for investor outreach planning (English).

• Venture secondaries buyers are primed for a busy year as startup employees look for a way to sell their stock and investors look to return capital to their own backers or reallocate it elsewhere (English).

• VC Aileen Lee , who coined the "unicorn" term in 2013, reviews the past ten years and the state of unicorns in 2024 (English).

• “Is the product or service actually getting better over time?” (English).

• "An early stage venture capitalist’s single most critical task is to make certain their portfolio companies do not hire the wrong executives" (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Turkey approved Sweden's membership in NATO. Now Hungary is the last holdout (English).

• A ransomware attack on the Finnish IT services and enterprise cloud hosting provider Tietoevry in Sweden has caused widespread outages and issues (English).

• Stockholm is getting a direct flight connection to Tokyo, as Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA) plans to start flying to the Swedish capital (English).

• Swedish EV maker Polestar plans to cut around 450 jobs globally (of which 250 in Sweden), or about 15% of its workforce (English, Swedish).

• Research from Chalmers University of Technology shows a positive climate impact of an electric aircraft after just one quarter of the expected lifespan (English).

• Swedish producer Max Martin has broken the record for the most Number 1 hits in the US Billboard Charts history (English).

• Sweden is a video piracy hotspot (English).

• How Sweden is future-proofing skiing (English).


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Martin