Swedish Tech Weekly #286


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 2672 subscribers today.

If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up for free on swedishtechweekly.com.

Mergers & acquisitions


• Predicare (Gothenburg; developer of RETTS, a decision support system for medical professionals) was acquired by Norway-based healthcare software provider Omda (English).

• The Ode To, bankrupt Stockholm-based online gallery and shop for art, has been acquired by the art dealers Pontus and Gabriella Klingspor (Swedish, machine translation).

Funding news

Do you have unreported funding news you want to see here? Respond to this email.

• Mynt (Stockholm, provider of corporate credit cards and spend management solutions): €22M ($23M) in a Series B funding round led by existing investor Vor Capital, with participation from other existing investors such as CNI and Incore Invest (English).

• Anyfin (Stockholm, consumer loan refinancing provider): €13.5M ($14M) from existing investors (English).

• Novatron Fusion (Stockholm, developer of fusion power technology): €3M ($3.2M) grant from the EIC Pathfinder program (English).

• TIC – The Intelligence Company (Hudiksvall, AI-powered credit score provider): SEK25M (€2.2M, $2.3M) led by CoFounded Kapital, with participation from other angel investors such as Andreas Ehn and Johannes Schild (English).

• Ledigajobb.se (Umeå, job platform): SEK20M (€1.7M, $1.8M) from a yet-to-be-disclosed publicly traded Swedish SaaS company (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• APR Technologies (Enköping, next generation in thermal management solutions): SEK19.3M (€1.7M, $1.8M) grant from the Swedish Energy Agency (English).

• Vetnio (Stockholm, solution for generating automatic medical notes for veterinary professionals): €1M ($1M) in a pre-seed funding round led by Peak and YZR Capital. Vetnio also emerged from stealth mode (English. ➡️ Company first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 11.

• 5 Swedish startups where accepted to the 2025 cohort of NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), and receive €100K each: APR Technologies, BLIXT, KASI Technologies, Scaleout, and Dolprop (English).

• EQT Ventures led a €23M Series A funding round raised by German startup Baller League, which focuses on developing indoor football leagues with its 6v6, 30-minute match format (English).

• Norrsken VC led a €10.5M seed round raised by German startup SpotmyEnergy, which offers an energy management and smart meter platform for homes (English).

• H&M Group participated in a $150M Series B funding round raised by US-based startup Heirloom, which is developing "the world’s most cost-effective DAC technology to permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere" (English).

• For PRO subscribers: Many 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

• Mingla, Stockholm-based startup developing tools for gamified networking at events, signed a contract with the NFL to be utilized at the Superbowl venue during the pre and side events (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Asaya Labs, Gothenburg-based platform for fair, efficient, and data-driven performance reviews founded by Arsaman Bahrami, has emerged from stealth mode (English). ➡️ Company first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on October 3.

• Milkywire, Stockholm-based platform for environmental action, secured a $5M commitment from Salesforce to pre-purchase durable carbon removal (CDR) credits (English).

• Bencha, data platform for second-hand market analytics launched earlier this year, has now "the most comprehensive understanding of the second-hand market in fashion globally", says founder and CEO Amanda Thorén (Swedish, machine translation).

• Gilion, the Stockholm-based alternative lending provider and growth platform for startups formerly known as ArK Kapital, is launching an investor matching feature (English).

• Sprintcrowd, Stockholm-based live platform for employee health and wellbeing, was named "Official Digital Training Platform of the Los Angeles Marathon" (English).

• KiddoKitchen, bootstrapped Stockholm-based startup that launched a mobile app to simplify baby meals in December 2022, announces having reached the mark of around 40,000 users, achieved with a marketing spend of only "a few hundred bucks" (Swedish, machine translation).

• Plick, Uppsala-based second-hand clothing and accessory app, returns to being majority-owned by its founders: Outside shareholder Schibsted Marketplaces has decreased its stake from 51% to 49%, to give more control to the founders (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Nexilink, Hestia, and Fixa are the three winners of the För-orten 2024 startup competition (Swedish, machine translation).

• NA-KD, VC-backed Gothenburg-based online fashion retailer, is entering a corporate restructuring process (Swedish, machine translation).

• Until Wednesday Di Digital accepts nominations for the annual votings for female founder and female investor of the year (Swedish).

• Swedish enterprise AI company Sana will hold its next annual AI Summit on May 7, 2025, in Stockholm (English).

• Yubico co-founder and former CEO Stina Ehrensvärd has established the Siros Foundation, to "offer open source code and tools, reference implementations, education and technical support for any organization to build interoperable and trusted identity systems at scale" (English).

• Swish will roll out a tap-to-pay card payment function for its 8.6 million mobile users. Android is first, and iOS is expected to follow. As with Apple Pay, banks need to individually support tap-to-pay via Swish (English)

•  Klarna has been fined SEK500M by the Swedish financial regulator for “significant deficiencies” that broke AML regulations from 2021 to 2022 (English)

• The Swedish Court of Appeals ruled that food delivery company Wolt must be classified as an employer. The company plans to appeal in the Supreme Administrative Court (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Cineville, a Dutch subscription-based movie ticketing service, is expected to launch in Sweden in 2025, with initially around 20 participating cinemas in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Skåne (Swedish, no machine translation available).

• Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has sold stock for $248.3M so far this year (English).

• Swedish VCs Susanne Najafi and Sara Wimmercranz warn in an op-ed in Dagens Industri that Sweden could see an increasing numbers of tech and innovation companies move abroad, if politicans don't listen to the needs of the sector and help resolve certain key challenges (Swedish, machine translation).

• Minc, the Startup House of Malmö, is looking for a new CEO. Current CEO Daniel Persson will leave the position in summer (Swedish / Rapidus paywall).

• Nicoya, Stockholm-based foodtech investment firm, has raised SEK45M in fresh cash (and SEK45M through set-off of previous debt), to be deployed in "the core holdings" (Swedish / Breakit paywall).


PRO subscribers also read last week

• 10 new Swedish tech startups tracked (644 so far this year)

• Two alumni of a high-profile Swedish tech startup founded a new startup in the energy space, currently in stealth mode.

• An under-the-radar startup backed with SEK110M in unannounced funding, revealed details about its new closed loop packaging system.

• A stealth startup from Stockholm developing an AI tool to help activate and retain users of new products, raised yet-to-be-announced pre-seed funding.

• A key figure in south Sweden's tech sector is launching a full-service AI automation agency, targeting startups and innovation companies.

• A founder based in Malmö who just made an exit, is back with a new startup, currently in stealth mode.

• Three Swedish SaaS startups were declared bankrupt last week.

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.

• bifrost security: Frontend Enginer & AI/ML Engineer
• Leya: large number of open positions
• Meela: Product Manager
• Planboo: Senior Software Engineer
• Roaring: Performance Marketing Manager
• PluvioFlow: Geographic Information System Software Developer
• Done: Business Area Manager - Installations
• Ingrid Capacity: various Engineering and Business roles
• Mitigram: Product Marketing Manager
• Portally: Full Stack Softwar Engineers

To the full listings

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond



• GP Bullhound published its third annual European SaaS report (English).

• Publicly traded SaaS stocks in the US are back. It’s not 2021 again, but much has changed between the beginning and end of 2024 (English).

• 25 hard questions founders should ask themselves (English).

• AI-driven automation will have the greatest immediate effect where it meets the least resistance (English).

• Sweden will host one of the first seven European "AI factories" (English).

• Stockholm claims sixth place in this year’s Urban Mobility Readiness Index, down from #3 last year (English).

• Adult Swedes performed well in an international competence test initiated by the OECD. Only Finland and Japan scored higher (English)

• Lars Wingefors, Swedish game industry serial entrepreneur and investor, is launching an airline named Sola Air, to connect his region Värmland with Stockholm and Copenhagen (Swedish, machine translation).

• Credit score provider Creditsafe published its annual list of the companies that pay the highest average salary to employees in Sweden (Swedish).