Swedish Tech Weekly #258

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This newsletter was sent on May 20, 2024, to subscribers of Swedish Tech Weekly. To receive future editions, you can sign up for free on swedishtechweekly.com.

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 2399 subscribers.

Mergers & acquisitions

• Swedish investment company Greenbridge is becoming a majority owner of Lund-based startup EpinovaTech, developer of green semiconductor solutions. Greenbridge is both acquiring shares from existing shareholders, as well as participating with an equity investment in EpinovaTech (English). ➡️ PRO subscribers learnt some more details about this deal.

Funding news

Do you have unreported funding news you want to see here? Fill out this form or respond to this email.

• Leya (Stockholm, AI assistant for lawyers): $10.5M in a seed funding round led by Benchmark, with participation from Hummingbird, SV Angel, existing investor Y Combinator, and undisclosed founders and operators (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall). ➡️ Rumors about this round first curated in my PRO subscription on March 29.

• Argus Eye (Linköping, sensor solutions for real-time monitoring of biological systems and processes): €2.8M ($3M) in a funding round led by Voima Ventures, and co-led by existing investor Eir Ventures (English).

• Grasp (Stockholm, AI assistant for investment bankers and management consultants): SEK20M (€1.7M, $1.9M) from Yanno Capital and Philian (English). ➡️ Company first covered in my PRO subscription in January 2023.

• LinkedClient (Stockholm, AI sales assistant for B2B): SEK17M (€1.5M, $1.6M) in a founding round led by Henrik Garvner (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Funding first covered in my PRO subscription on March 13.

• North House (Stockholm, B2B SaaS governance document platform): SEK5M (€430K, $460K) from angel investors including Maria Hedengren, Sören Mellstig, and Ann Grevelius (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Partial closing of this round first covered in my PRO subscription on January 25.

• Nordluft (Stockholm, high-capacity drone systems for swarming and heavy loads to enable efficient and sustainable material handling in forestry and agriculture): SEK3M (€260K, $280K) from new investor Södra Ädla, and an undisclosed smaller amount from existing investor EIT InnoEnergy (English, Swedish / Impact Loop paywall).

• SeaPattern (Linköping, developer of an AI-based system for optimizing synergy in electricity production using floating Darrieus turbines in flowing water): undisclosed amount from LiU Invest (English).

• Trill Impact Ventures co-led a $25M Series B funding round raised by May Health, a French-American medical device company targeting Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) related infertility (English).

• Creandum led a €16.5M Series A funding round raised by German startup Codesphere, which enables developers to program and scale complex applications directly in the cloud (English).

• Mudcake participated in a €1.3M pre-seed round raised by German startup hexafarms, which offers a platform for farm and greenhouse operators "to track, monitor, optimise, plan, and forecast" (English).

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

News from Swedish startups & the tech sector

• Stockfiller (Stockholm, purchasing platform for buyers and suppliers in the food industry) reports net revenue of SEK72.1M for 2023 on a group level, up a massive 350% year-over-year. The company also turned profitable (English). ➡️ PRO subscribers read some more details, as well as about many other fresh annual reports from Swedish tech startups.

• Sana unveiled its next-generation knowledge assistant at the company's high profile AI summit last week in Stockholm (English).

• xTactor, Stockholm-based developer of a wristband that translates information from/to the smartphone into vibration patterns, announced expanding functionality, which is based on Morse code and uses AI to interpret the entered code (Swedish, machine translation).

• BokaBord, Stockholm-based company offering table reservation solutions for restaurants, has founded the separate startup Guestrix, which just launched its "user-friendly analytics companion for restaurants" (English/Swedish).

• Kärnfull Next, Gothenburg-based small modular reactor project development startup, is commercial partner in a Swedish initiative to develop a next-generation Gen IV nuclear power system. The project is led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, and has received a SEK50M grant from the Swedish Energy Agency (English).

• CemVision, Stockholm-based developer of "the world's most resource-efficient cement", has entered into a product delivery agreement with the major Nordic construction company Peab (English).

• Einride signed a major deal with Dubai-based multinational logistics giant DP World, which will use hundreds of Einride’s electric trucks to haul containers around the shipyard at Dubai's massive port (English).

• Vinden, Stockholm-based provider of an on-demand storage service, is bankrupt, according to public Swedish company data. Vinden had raised slightly over SEK50M in funding. ➡️ PRO subscribers learnt some more details last week, as well as about a few other bankruptcies and shutdowns.

• Tioex, the Swedish membership-based investment platform for buying secondary shares in growth companies, acquired existing shares worth $1M in OpenAI competitor Anthropic (English).

• Swedish hybrid-electric airplane maker Heart Aerospace is opening a new Research and Development hub in the U.S., more specifically in Los Angeles (English).

• Epidemic Sound, Stockholm-based music licensing provider for creators, is reportedly in the early stages of "considering strategic options, including a stock market listing in 2025" (English).

• Bootlr is an experimental AI-powered shopping assistant created by the Sweden-based developer Gustavo De Oliveira.

• Klarna is reportedly in talks with potential buyers for its checkout business (which is mostly used in the Nordics), to be able to fully focus on the payments part (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Klarna also shared some more details on how its internal AI assistant "Kiki" is improving performance and productivity (English).

• Utopia, a Swiss-based music technology company founded by Swedish entrepreneur Mattias Hjelmstedt, is closing down its Swedish entity (English). Here's a Google sheet with mostly technical talents looking for new jobs (English).

• The Swedish government has tasked the country's innovation agency Vinnova with establishing and coordinating efforts to restructure the public support system for startups and scaleups, so that it can be more effective (Swedish, machine translation).

• Norrsken VC announced the final close of its second fund, at €320M – surpassing the original target of €250M. The finalised total makes Norrsken VC Fund II the largest early-stage generalist impact fund in Europe (English).

• Breakit published a list featuring 151 women investing in Swedish startups (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• A new season of the TV show Draknästet (Swedish version of Dragon's Den) will air in fall. Two new faces will join the den: The entrepreneurs and investors Hellen Wohlin Lidgard and Evelina Anttila (Swedish, machine translation).

• Nyamko Sabuni, Swedish politician and former leader of the liberal party, has started an investment company, to "channel Nordic equity investments to Africa". The firms first two investments went to the startups Roam and MPOST (Swedish).

Exclusives for PRO subscribers

• More funding rounds (including selected unannounced rounds).
• News not covered/curated anywhere else.
• More numbers and details, yet brief and high signal-to-noise ratio.
• Curated list with bankruptcies and shutdowns of Swedish tech startups.
• Curated list with new Swedish tech startups (almost 250 added so far this year).
• Curated data sheets on funding rounds, bankruptcies and new startups.

Join PRO, if you are an early-stage investor, analyst, or a smart sales exec.

A subscription-free access option for a set period paid by invoice is available, too!

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• US VC firm Accel has raised a new $650M fund to back startups from seed to Series A across Europe and Israel (English). Among the firm's past Swedish investments are Napper, Datia, and Kry / Livi.

• Belgian investor Pitchdrive has raised its third fund of €40M to support early-stage startups in Europe (English). Among the firm's past Swedish investments are Silo Team and Version Lens.

• As OpenAI and Google announce a new round of advances, startups try to figure out where they fit in (English).

• How major US VC firms are using podcasts to attract founders (English).

• Seven product strategies for preventing churn for B2B AI app leaders (English).

• Founders need to understand why a VC might pay attention to seemingly small "flaws" (such as a deck with an old date) (English).

• "Vesting protects the most committed founders from the least committed ones" (English).

• A study found corporate recruiters have a bias against ex-entrepreneurs (English).

• The Swedish government's AI commission will publish its report more than half a year earlier than initially planned, due to the urgency and importance of AI for Sweden's future and competitiveness. "There is no time to lose" (Swedish, machine translation).

• The Swedish Consumers' Association and 16 other European consumer protection groups have filed coordinated complaints against Temu, accusing the Chinese-owned ultra low-cost e-commerce platform of a raft of breaches related to the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) (English, Swedish).

• AI Sweden and the German Fraunhofer IAIS will train language models for 45 European languages and dialects (Swedish, machine translation).

• Researchers at Linköping University have developed a battery made from zinc and lignin that can be used over 8,000 times, with a vision to provide a cheap and sustainable battery solution for countries where access to electricity is limited (English).

• The Stockholm School of Economics will offer all new bachelor students a crash course in happiness and wellbeing, starting from August (English).

• Netflix and SVT Play – the streaming platform of Swedish public service broadcaster SVT – are the two most used SVOD streaming services in Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).

• "It's the cold weather" – Sweden's small game studios are punching above their weight (English).

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