Swedish Tech Weekly #261

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This newsletter was sent on June 10, 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. Last week's issues: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday.

Today Swedish Tech Weekly is being sent to 2415 subscribers.

Mergers & acquisitions

• Swedish PE firm Altor acquires the remaining assets of bankrupt Swedish textile recycling company Renewcell, and rebrands the company as Circulose (English).

• BidTheatre (Stockholm, independent programmatic advertising platform) is being acquired by Umeå-based provider and acquirer of standardized niche software and SaaS solutions Vitec (English).

• Doktor.se (Stockholm, digital healthcare provider) is acquiring the smaller competitor Doktor24 (Swedish / Di Digital paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).

• The assets of Lexly, Stockholm-based provider of online legal services founded in 2004 as Avtal24, are being acquired by its minority investor Roosgruppen (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Fenix Solar (Helsingborg, digital twin-based monitoring solution for solar farms) is being acquired by Eskilstuna-based solar company ECOKRAFT (English).

Funding news

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

• Aira (Stockholm, D2C heat pump subscription service): €200M ($220M) in debt funding from BNP Paribas, to facilitate the installation of heat pumps in homes across Germany (English).

• Spiideo (Malmö; AI-powered solution for sports video recording, analysis, and broadcasting): $20M in a growth round led by Cipio Partners (English).

• Instabee (Stockholm, operator of last-mile logistic brands Instabox and Budbee): SEK216M (€19M, $21M) in bridge funding led by new investor EQT – though EQT Ventures is a previous investor (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Modvion (Gothenburg, developer of modular wind turbine towers in laminated wood): SEK67M (€6M, $6.4M) from new investor CMPC Ventures, and existing investors including Vestas Ventures, Almi Invest GreenTech, Course Corrected, and Symbia VC (English).

• Decade Energy (Paris & Stockholm, upcoming software platform that manages truck operators’ transitions to electric fleets): €3.6M ($3.9M) in a seed round led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Contrarian Ventures. The startup was founded by a team of former operators from Volta Trucks, including founder Carl-Magnus Norden (English).

• Vopy (Stockholm; SaaS solution helping banks and fintechs in emerging markets to provide their customers with regulatory friendly, international saving- and investment products): SEK10.6M (€930K, $1M) from existing investor Front Ventures, among others (Swedish, machine translation).

• MedVasc (Lund, developer of a medical device designed to improve the anesthetic procedure when treating varicose veins): SEK5M (€440K, $480K) in a bridge round from existing investors (English).

• AlixLabs (Lund, method for manufacturing nanostructures which enables the semiconductor industry to scale down in a cost effective manner): SEK2.5M (€220K, $240K) grant from Vinnova (English).

• CheckProof (Stockholm, all-in-one platform for the construction materials industry): undisclosed "significant amount" from Viking Venture, for continued growth across North America and Europe (English).

• Anferra (Gothenburg; technology that turns steel grinding swarf, a waste today largely landfilled, into high-quality input for producing water treatment chemicals): undisclosed amount from Chalmers Ventures (Swedish, machine translation).

• Creandum led a €12M Series A financing round raised by German startup Plancraft, which offers a contractor operating system for crafts people (English).

• Spintop Ventures led a €1.3M funding round in Norwegian startup Keenious, which offers an AI-driven academic research tool (English).

• For PRO subscribers: 8 additional rounds, as well as more details and numbers for many of the covered rounds (English).

• For PRO subscribers: Google Sheet with funding data, 1000+ rounds added during the past 12 months, updated daily (English).

News from Swedish startups & the tech sector

• Sweden remains the top-ranked startup country in the Nordics, although dropping to 6th globally in the just launched Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2024. Stockholm continues to lead as the region’s premier startup city, despite falling seven spots to 26th globally (English).

• Aetha Motors is the name of the until recently nameless stealth startup co-founded by former X Shore CEO Jenny Keisu. "We are building a new kind of company and car that will radically transform how the Earth feels about sports cars", says the LinkedIn page.

• gradr, a Stockholm-based startup founded this year working on an automated AI tool that efficiently generates and automatically evaluates exams, recently got write-ups at both Breakit (here) and Di Digital (here). ➡️ Company first covered in my PRO subscription on March 20.

• NaturaTua, a Malmö-based platform for co-investments into protecting and restoring natural forests, grasslands and wetlands, announced the first investment, into 55 hectares of Swedish land in Ustorp, Småland (English).

• Profile of new Swedish startup Edda Pay, which is working on a royalty payout solution that addresses the financial challenges authors and publishers face (Swedish, machine translation).

• Flic (Shortcut Labs), Stockholm-based creator of smart buttons, does now allow Tesla owners to control their cars via Flic buttons from their home, for example to lock/unlock doors, defrost, or activate the seat heater (English).

• Evify, fast growing Stockholm-based provider of EV charging solutions for consumers, is launching in Denmark (Danish, machine translation).

• Glänta, a startup from Lund, is developing a new type of sex toy for female consumers, and aims to raise SEK20M in funding to finalize the prototype and conduct tests (Swedish, machine translation).

• Microsoft plans to invest SEK33.7B ($3.2 billion) over two years in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure in Sweden, and to train 250,000 Swedes with AI skills within organisations, schools, universities, public sector and society at large (English, Swedish).

• CoreWeave, an US-based self-described "AI hyperscaler", will also open a data center in Sweden (English).

• Yuncture, the Gothenburg-based startup hub, launches its 15th incubator program, covering medtech (Swedish, machine translation).

• The Nordic Fe:male Invest Summit 2024 will take place on November 6 in Malmö.

• The Nordic Women in Tech Awards 2024 will take place on November 13 in Oslo, Norway.

• Sweden-headquartered VC firm Creandum has announced its seventh fund, at €500M, to make 35-40 investments at seed and Series A stages in Europe across all sectors over the next two to three years (English).

• Partnerinvest Norr launched its third fund at SEK175M, to be invested in 50-60 startups from northern Sweden during the next five years (Swedish, machine translation).

• Jenny Engerfelt has become partner at Voima Ventures in Stockholm, two years after joining the firm (English).

Exclusives for PRO subscribers

PRO subscribers also read about last week:

• 8 additional funding rounds raised by Swedish tech startups.
• 18 new Swedish tech startups.
• 4 Swedish tech bankruptcies/shutdowns.
• 10 selected, noteworthy annual reports from Swedish tech startups.
• Other news not curated/covered elsewhere.

Join PRO, if you are a startup investor, an analyst, or in an adjacent role.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• The Financial Times sees new large funds by Creandum, Accel Europe and Plural as a sign that investors revive enthusiasm for European tech startups (English).

• Global pre-seed and seed VC deals in generative AI declined sharply in Q1 (English).

• Y Combinator is trying to build a lobbying operation that fights on behalf of “Little Tech,” the thousands of venture-backed firms competing for a place in the emerging AI economy (English).

• VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market (English).

• "The democratization of media creation and distribution led to the rise of content creators. Similarly, the democratization of software creation and distribution, now accelerated by AI, will usher in the rise of 'software creators'" (English).

• SaaS companies raising a Series A in 2024 have a lower headcount (English).

• "Tech reporters, you’re being played by using 'oversubscribed' to describe successful funding rounds" (English).

• Don’t have an “exit strategy” slide, have a "competitive and cooperative landscape" slide (English).

• Mark Zuckerberg is popular again thanks to Meta’s open source AI (English).

• The Swedish government considers letting police use facial recognition technology from cameras in public places, for example to identify people suspected of certain crimes (English, Swedish).

• Sweden's innovation agency Vinnova proposes a competence center for semiconductor technology in Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).

• Swedish vineyards, micro-breweries and smaller scale distilleries will soon be allowed to sell their own products directly to visitors (English, Swedish).

• KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm ranks #74 among 1,500 universities worldwide, #9 in the European Union, and highest among universities in Sweden, in the 2025 QS World University Rankings. Lund University comes right behind, at #75 globally.

• The number of people in Sweden who say that they used Snus (smokeless tobacco) in the past month, has increased from 12% in 2011, to 21% in 2023 (Swedish, machine translation).

• May’s auto sales saw plugin EVs at 53.6% share in Sweden, down YoY from 61.9% (English).

• Sweden’s first "Mobility Hotel" has opened in Gothenburg, a physical hub co-financed through the EU, that combines micromobility and micro-logistics services to transport people and goods around the inner city (English).

• The award-winning Swedish rapper C.Gambino has been shot dead in Gothenburg. Just weeks ago, he received Sweden's most prestigious music prize, the Grammis (English, Swedish).

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