Swedish Tech Weekly #271

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This newsletter was sent on September 2, 2024 to subscribers of Swedish Tech Weekly.


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, and is sent to 2528 subscribers today.

Mergers & acquisitions



• Techarena, the Swedish entrepreneurship and innovation platform, has acquired Time to Raise, Swedish accelerator program focused on fundraising for women-led companies (English).

• Swedish high-tech engineering group Sandvik is acquiring the Australia-based startup Universal Field Robots, a provider of autonomous interoperable solutions for the surface mining and underground mining markets (English).

Funding news

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• RECOMA (Hässleholm; developer of a low-carbon, fully circular alternative to traditional construction boards, made from discarded waste): SEK33.5M (€2.9M, $3.3M) grant from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's initiative Klimatklivet (Swedish, machine translation).

• MoveByBike (Malmö, publicly traded smart city logistics provider with distribution via e-cargo bikes): SEK27.5M (€2.4M, $2.7M) through a rights issue, before issue costs and offsets of loans and receivables (Swedish, machine translation).

• Nordic SeaFarm (Gothenburg, cultivating seaweed in nutritious Swedish waters): SEK25M (€2.2M, $2.5M) in a funding round led by EIT InnoEnergy and Inter IKEA Group (English).

• BrainZell (Stockholm, screening platform for pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals using stem cell based 3D models of human brain): SEK15M (€1.3M, $1.5M) led by Industrifonden, with participation from Life Science Invest, Norrsken Accelerator, Creator Fund UK, Wicked Angel, and Intercapital (English). ➡️ First covered in my PRO subscription on August 22.

• Uman Sense (Lund, developer of a wearable aid for patients with elevated stroke risk): SEK12M (€1.1M, $1.2M) from SmiLe Inject Capital and other so far undisclosed investors (Swedish, no machine translation available).

• Reworks (Stockholm & San Francisco; solution to convert any software into reliable, LLM-ready API:s in minutes): $500K from Y Combinator. Reworks was founded by Melvin Hagberg and Erik Heimdal, and participates in the Y Combinator summer 2024 program. ➡️ First covered in my PRO subscription on May 20.

• ParkingAid (Stockholm, app for finding a parking spot): SEK1M (€88K, $98K) raised in the show Draknästet from angel investors Fredrik Eklund, Hellen Wohlin Lidgard, Jonas Tellander, Evelina Anttila, and Shervin Razani (📺 Swedish).

• Interspectral (Norrköping, creator of software for 3D-visualization of real captured data): undisclosed amount in a funding round led by Navigare Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Skagerack Ventures (English).

• Intelligyn (Stockholm, AI-powered diagnostic support tool and education platform for ovarian tumor diagnostics): undisclosed amount from Impact Invest. ➡️ Startup first covered in my PRO subscription on January 9.

• Nano Dentica (Gothenburg, nanotechnology for dental applications): undisclosed amount from Almi Invest (Swedish, machine translation).

• Backing Minds led a €5.35M funding round raised by Danish cybersecurity startup Uniqkey, which provides a mobile app-based security solution that simplifies access to company systems (English).

• The Inner Foundation participated in a €1.4M funding round raised by Tiimo, a Denmark-based startup offering an app dedicated to supporting neurodivergent individuals through innovative planning and learning tools (English).

• For PRO subscribers: Many additional rounds, as well as more details, valuations, and numbers for many 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

• I published the Swedish Tech Startup Report for August. To access, upgrade to PLUS or PRO.

• GPT Engineer, the AI-powered chat-based web app builder created by Stockholm-based AI startup Lovable, has launched its Beta version. There's still a waitlist though.

• Baibe, a Stockholm-based startup founded by Eva Leach and Gabriel Sabadin, has launched an AI companion app "specifically designed to combat loneliness". Baibe is now available for iPhone. A web and Android version will follow.

• LexEnergy, Gothenburg-based startup developing electricity storage and charging solutions for urban environments, cites bookings worth SEK350M for the next version of its LexHub fast charger (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Bright, Stockholm-based platform for digital textbooks founded this year, has launched.

• Hello Literature is a new iOS app launched by Humy, Stockholm-based startup specialized in AI teaching assistants. It lets educators, parents, students and lifelong learners chat with characters from literary masterpieces. Android will follow.

• Profile of Tructric, a Stockholm-based startup that is developing a horizontal technology for loading trailers to railway wagons at terminals (Swedish, machine translation).

• Rerun, Stockholm-based startup developing an open-source visualization engine for streams of multimodal data, made it to the Hacker News front page last week (English).

• Elonroad, the Lund-based developer of electric road technology that allows for automatic charging of EV, is investigating the possibilities of building an electric road on the Öresund Bridge, which connects Sweden and Denmark (Swedish, machine translation).

• Stockeld Dreamery, Stockholm-founded maker of plant-based cheese, is phasing out its commercial activities in Sweden, and will entirely focus on the US market (Swedish / Impact Loop paywall).

• Transfer Galaxy, Örebro-based remittance service for immigrants founded in 2014, turned profitable last year, while growing revenue by 9% to SEK185.1M (Swedish, machine translation).

• Velocity (formerly Snabbt) is again looking for entrepreneurial-minded young people in Sweden interested in joining a fully paid week in Silicon Valley with top Swedish entrepreneurs, sponsored by EQT Ventures and Sprints.

• The applications for the Time to Raise cohort 6 are open until the September 18. Various high-profile international VC firms are participating in the fall program.

• Swish, the dominant Swedish payments app owned by major banks, is rolling out a recurring payments feature for automated transactions between users and businesses (Swedish, machine translation).

• Swedish data center company EcoDataCenter and the US-based self-described "AI hyperscaler" CoreWeave will jointly build "the first large-scale NVIDIA Blackwell cluster in Europe", in Sweden. The establishment will take place in Falun (English).

• A Nordic AI Center focused on the responsible development and use of AI could become reality (English).

• Klarna grew revenue during the first half of 2024 by 27% to SEK13.3B (€1.2B, $1.3B). In Q2, net income was effectively break-even (English).

• Klarna's founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says that the company could reduce its workforce from currently 3800 to around 2,000 over the coming years, thanks to AI. A year ago, Klarna had 5000 employees (English).

• Flat Capital, Sebastian and Nina Siemiatkowski's publicly traded investment firm, is investing SEK22M in the Elon Musk-led rocket and spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX (English).

PRO subscribers last week also read about

• Alumni and a co-founder of a major Swedish tech startup raised first, yet-to-be-announced funding for their stealth startup in the energy distribution space.

• Alumni of another Swedish tech company founded a startup that just soft-launched a new kind of productivity app.

• A new Swedish startup wants to reinvent the dental care model and relieve patients from complex pricing and shady upselling.

• Assets of two Swedish tech companies, one in esports and one live shopping, have found buyers.

• A Swedish startup that, if successful, could completely revolutionize how cities look and operate, welcomes a new co-founder.

• And much more!

Join PRO here. Ideal for startup investors and analysts.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• In a study with 111 male early-stage investors from Switzerland and Germany, perceived attractiveness of a female entrepreneur led to a higher likelihood of a willingness to invest. Attractive founders were also perceived as more competent (English).

• "VC money is like rocket fuel, and you don’t get rocket fuel just to continue grocery shopping every day. You have to get to space". I found this quote in a piece about the game engine company Unity.

• "When a founder’s personal power starts to exceed the power of their company, something shifts. They get anxious, frustrated, dissatisfied, bored" (English).

• A "Generative AI Prioritization Framework", aiming to help organizations easily identify which initiatives they should start with, in order to make the GenAI adoption as smooth and successful as possible (English).

• IKEA is testing a peer-to-peer marketplace for customers to sell secondhand furniture to each other, in Madrid and Oslo (English).

• A Swedish-Finish consortium has placed a bid on the Belgian power semiconductor foundry Belgan, which filed for bankruptcy last month (English, Swedish).

• Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has successfully completed its restructuring proceedings, citing "the start of a new era" (English).

• Swedish authorities warn that neobanks active on the Swedish market face a significant risk of being used for money laundering and the financing of terrorism (Swedish / Di paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).

• The two Swedish pharmacy chains Apoteket and Apohem are fined SEK37M and SEK8M respectively by the Swedish Data Protection Authority (IMY), after having transferred privacy-sensitive customer data to Meta (Swedish, machine translation).

• Apropos IMY: The agency is being taken to court by the European privacy rights activist organization noyb, for refusing to properly deal with complaints (English).

• Uppsala and Umeå have Europe's cleanest air, according to the European Environment Agency’s (EEA) updated European city air quality viewer (English).

• A large majority of Swedes do not like the idea of recreating deceased people as digital replicas, according to a survey with 4512 participants aged 18-79 (Swedish, machine translation).

• Swedish football coach Sven-Göran Eriksson ("Svennis") has died aged 76. He managed a number of high-profile teams and took England to World Cup quarter-finals in 2002 and 2006 (English, Swedish).