Swedish Tech Weekly #284



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 2663 subscribers today.

Mergers & acquisitions


• The bankruptcy estate of Vakanta, Stockholm-based platform for the contingent workforce, has been acquired by Visma Proceedo (Swedish, machine translation).

Funding news

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• Sitoo (Stockholm, cloud-native POS and unified commerce platform for global retailers): €26M ($27M) from Verdane, for the continued global expansion (English).

• 360Player (Stockholm, all-in-one platform for modern sports clubs): around SEK125M (€11M, $11M) in strategic growth capital from Five Elms Capital, which also acquires shares from existing shareholders for another SEK125M (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• PocketLaw (Stockholm, all-in-one AI platform for legal teams): SEK50M (€4.3M, $4.6M) from existing investors including Atomico, and new investor Willard Ahdritz (English).

• Acorai (Helsingborg, device for heart failure management through non-invasive intracardiac pressure monitoring): $4.5M from EIC Fund, Taiwan Medical University, and private investors (English). ➡️ Funding first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on September 5.

• Meitner (Stockholm, education platform for schools): SEK25.6M (€2.2M, $2.4M) from Joel Almqvist and Alexander Grepe, among others (Swedish, machine translation).

• Emission Twin (Malmö, SaaS tool simplifying and enhancing carbon management efforts): SEK10M (€870K, $920K) led by a group of angel investors including Hypergene founder Per Hidenius. Other participating investors are Loop Capital, Hetch, and Octaquest (Swedish / Rapidus paywall).

• Vizcon (Varberg; developer of Bygghub, a SaaS platform for businesses in the construction industry): undisclosed amount from Almi Invest, Halland Invest, Ensolution Holding, Potential Varberg, Bergenheim Invest, and Johan Berndtsson (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Swedish Tech News PRO subscribers learned more details not covered elswhere.

• Mingla (Stockholm, tools for gamified networking at events): SEK3M (€260K, $270K) from angel investors Adele Treschow, Noi Cecilia Oldne, Elsa Hyland, Karin Bjerde, and Joel Borg (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on March 7.

• Angry Camel (Malmö, maker of protein made from chickpeas): SEK2.2M (€190K, $200K) grant from Vinnova, to develop a method to extract and optimize chickpea protein as an egg alternative in the food industry (English). ➡️ Swedish Tech News PRO subscribers learned more details not covered elswhere

• Creandum led a $26M Series A funding round raised by Israel-based startup Appcharge, which offers a direct-to-consumer platform for mobile game publishers to scale paying user growth (English).

• Norrsken VC led a €13M Series A funding round raised by German proptech startup Predium, which provides ESG management solutions for the real estate and finance industry (English).

• EQT Ventures led a €6M seed funding round raised by French startup Biolevate, which offers AI-assisted tools for life sciences (English).

• EQT Ventures also led a €3.9M seed round raised by Argil, a French video generation engine for the creator economy (English).

• Neptunia Invest participated in a €3M pre-seed funding round raised by UK-based commercial solar platform Volter (English).

• For PRO subscribers: 9 additional rounds as well as more details and numbers (English).

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

News from the Swedish startup & tech sector

• Dentme wants to reinvent the dental care model and relieve patients from complex pricing and shady upselling. The Swedish startup was founded by serial entrepreneur and licensed dentist Noel Abdayem, together with Sofia Landström, and opens its first high-end clinic in Stockholm today (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on August 29.

• Quartr, Stockholm-based data platform for qualitative public market research, announced a partnership with AI search engine Perplexity (English). ➡️ News first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 21.

• Transparent, Stockholm-based maker of timeless, modular electronics, launched a new high-end speaker, which resembles brutalist design (English).

• The Stockholm-based serial entrepreneur couple Ana and Klas Kristiansson founded two fashiontech startups this year: Portia, and SUSTAIN20. Here's an interview with Ana Kristiansson about the just launched latter one (English).

• Jobbs, Lidköping-based platform for unmanned stores and access control, developed a proprietary control box, touted as "both easy to use and packed with opportunities for unmanned retail" (Swedish, machine translation).

• PE Accounting, Stockholm-based digital accounting solution, is rebranding as Kleer, and launches a Finance-as-a-Service (FaaS) offering, promising customers a solution for finance and payroll, combing software and financial expertise, for a fixed monthly cost (Swedish, machine translation).

• QA.tech, Stockholm-based AI agent-powered QA testing solution, launched on Product Hunt (English).

• Noctie, Umeå-based startup offering a "humanlike chess AI", also launched on Product Hunt, with its latest version (English).

• Elsa Science, Stockholm-based startup offering a digital solution for managing rheumatic conditions through self-care and remote monitoring, is bankrupt. The company raised around SEK110M in funding. ➡️ Bankruptcy first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 28.

• Also bankrupt: Wood Tube, a Karlstad-based startup that's developing paper studs to build climate smart products. ➡️ Bankruptcy first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 27.

• Impact Loop mapped 24 Swedish startups working on making materials more sustainable (Swedish / Impact Loop paywall).

• Matsmart-Motatos, the Swedish online seller of surplus production and overstocks, is laying off 20% of the workforce (Swedish, machine translation).

• Swedish online pharmacy Apotea expects to start trading at Nasdaq in Stockholm on December 6, and is being valued at around SEK6B (English).

• Northvolt plans to pay $5.4M in bonuses to around 230 key employees that are not part of the management's innermost circle, to "maintain work ethic, motivation and loyalty and avoid business interruption during the Chapter 11 process" (Swedish, machine translation).

• A look at the causes of some of the production challenges that contributed to Northvolt's crisis (English).

• Nordic Angels and BCG published their annual State of European Angels report (English).

• Monterro, Swedish B2B software investor, is establishing an office and team in Copenhagen (English).

• PolarVentures, the new VC arm of Swedish family-owned bread company Polarbröd, plans to invest SEK150M in green food companies over the next five years (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Rebecka Löthman Rydå joins Norrsken Accelerator as General Partner (English).

• Swedish serial entrepreneur Konrad Bergström, who founded Zound Industries and X Shore, joins Stockholm-based early-stage VC Wellstreet as General Partner and senior advisor (English).


PRO subscribers also read last week

• 17 new Swedish tech startups tracked (619 so far this year).

• A Swedish serial entrepreneur whose software startup was recently acquired, is getting into the defense space, with a new startup.

• An under-the-radar provider of energy storage solutions secured major unannounced funding, and reached over SEK100M in net revenue, and profitability, during its first year.

• Fresh details on a stealth startup working on an AI-powered platform for digital textbooks and course material.

• A Swedish development platform for startups raised unannounced funding from a major Nordic VC.

• Esports veterans launched a new matchmaking and competition platform.

And much more! Swedish Tech News PRO gives startup investors, analysts, and VC teams an easy information advantage. Join today.

Selected Swedish tech startup jobs

A non-exhaustive selection of open positions at Swedish tech startups.

• Lovable: various roles in Engineering and Product Marketing
• Mentimeter: various roles, including CPO and CTO
• Foodtel: Software Engineer (Full-Stack)
• Ingrid: Revenue Operations Systems Manager
• Plagazi: Senior Financial Analyst
• Nordic Angels: CEO/Co-founder for a subsidiary
• Bright Materia: Chief Commercial Officer
• Triform: Front-End Lead/Svelte Developer
• Northmill : Commercial Manager
• Billo: Senior Product Designer
• Fever: Asset Operations Specialist

To the full listings

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond


• "Northvolt’s near-collapse exposes systemic flaws in Europe’s green tech strategy and its struggle to compete globally in battery manufacturing" (English).

• Tech analyst Benedict Evans released its annual presentation exploring strategic trends in the tech sector. The title: "AI eats the world" (English).

• AI's ability to spot patterns may help to capture tacit knowledge in organizations (English).

• VC thoughts on how software development is changing, and what that means for startups (English).

• "If you’ve had a rough year, and then one great month of growth — well, that’s not enough for VCs. But put together 3 strong months, and go fundraise hard" (English).

• The Swedish Government's AI Commission submitted its final report ahead of schedule to "emphasizes one of the key messages: Sweden must take urgent action". One of the Commission's suggestions is an "AI for all" reform, which would give all Swedes free access to AI tools, akin to the "Hem-PC reform" of the 1990s (Swedish / full report with 136 pages).

• Only 37% of Swedes have a positive attitude about how AI affects them as private individuals, down 17 percentage points from 2021, according to a new survey (Swedish, machine translation).

• The number of registered EVs in Sweden has crossed the 400,000 mark, representing 8% of the total number of registered cars, and an increase of 29% YoY (Swedish, machine translation).

• Sweden's Riksbank opened its payment system RIX-INST to more types of instant payments. Previously, the system was only open to Swish payments (English).

• Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) will launch the first-ever direct flight between Scandinavia (more specific, their hub in Copenhagen), and Seoul, South Korea, in September 2025 (English).