Swedish Tech Weekly #296


Welcome 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 previously covered in my daily PRO newsletters, and is sent to 2742 subscribers today.

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Mergers & acquisitions

• Clar (Stockholm, solutions for digitizing the global consumer credit market) acquired the Estonian fintech startup Fiizy (English).

Funding news

Are you a founder in fundraising mode? Get free access to the FOUNDER version of my funding database.

• Lovable (Stockholm, AI web app builder): $15M pre-Series A funding round led by Creandum. Lovable now cites an ARR of $17M (only three months after launching), and says it so far only used $2M of the $7.5M pre-seed funding raised last year (English). ➡️ PRO subscribers were the first anywhere on the web to read about Lovable, already in early February 2024.

• Emerging Cooking Solutions (Lund, clean affordable sustainable cooking solutions for domestic households in Africa): €4M ($4.2M) from The Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) and EDFI Management Company (English, Swedish / Rapidus paywall).

• Scaleout (Uppsala; federated learning platform for leveraging siloed, business sensitive and regulated data in ML pipelines): SEK35M (€3.1M, $3.3M) in a funding round co-led by new investor Fairpoint Capital, and existing investor Navigare Ventures (English).

• Fibbl (Stockholm, plug-and-play platform for integrating 3D and AR technologies into e-commerce): €3M led by existing investor Industrifonden (English).

• Sponswatch (Stockholm, AI-powered solution for brands and properties wanting to measure logotype exposure in relation to sponsorships): €1M in a seed funding round led by node.vc, with participation from Venrex (English).

• veyra (Stockholm, data & analytics platform for Statistical Process Control and Process Capability): SEK6M (€540, $560) in an angel round (Swedish / Breakit paywall). ➡️ Startup first covered (under its initial name) in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 29.

• Bioservo (Stockholm, wearable muscle strengthening systems): undisclosed amount from Life Science Invest (Swedish, machine translation).

News from the Swedish startup & tech sector

• earthforce launched its platform connecting the best talent with companies working on climate solutions. The bootstrapped Stockholm-based startups' first goal is to "get the 600+ Swedish climate impact companies to the platform - to then expand geographically and eventually include other impact categories" (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on October 18.

• EYTE, Stockholm-based startup founded last year and recent SSE Business Lab participant, launched its platform giving collectors direct access to artworks from students at leading art schools. ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 24.

• Apropos SSE Business Lab: The Stockholm School of Economics' incubator scores #8 in the second annual ranking of Europe’s Leading Startup Hubs, up 18 spots. It's the top ranked hub from Sweden (English).

• Squidler, Malmö-based automated website testing platform for SMEs, is about to launch an autopilot for developers, enabling them to test web app functionally in a browser while they are building it (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO in December 2023.

• Profile of Againity and interview with its founder David Frykerås. The profitable Norrköping-based company develops Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems that convert waste heat into electricity (Swedish, machine translation).

• Sinonus, a Borås-based startup that aimed to commercialize so-called massless energy storage technology, is "pausing all activities", and transfering technology rights back to Chalmers University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology (English).

• Esplay, Norrköping-based matchmaking and competition platform for esports, crossed the mark of 50,000 players – three months after launch (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on November 28.

• Silo Team, Stockholm-based developer onboarding tool, successfully launched on Product Hunt (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO in January 2023.

• Swiperoom, a Stockholm-based marketplace for homes and interior design, is bankrupt (English).

• Qred, Stockholm-based small business lending platform founded in 2015, announced having exceeded SEK1B in annual revenue (English).

• Nrlyze, a Stockholm-based software startup, is "moving its business from an American cloud service provider to a Swedish one", partly due to "strategic decisions for these suppliers was moved to Mar-a-Lago" (English). Related read which blew up on Hacker News: "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds" (English).

• Exa Laboratories, the Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded and led by the Swede Elias Almqvist, is looking for a Founding Engineer (based in San Francisco). Exa is developing energy efficient chips for AI, and aims for nothing less than "building the next NVIDIA" (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO in May 2024.

• Boozt, Swedish online fashion retailer, plans to move its headquarter from Malmö to nearby Danish capital city Copenhagen (Swedish, machine translation).

• In the latest edition of its program "Uppdrag granskning", Sweden's national broadcaster SVT exposes Northvolt's failure to build a truly homegrown battery (English, 📺 Swedish / 57 minutes).

• The often-repeated advice for founders to keep cap tables short needs to be questioned, argue five high profile Swedish entrepreneurs and angel investors in an op-ed (Swedish, machine translation).

• The annual SaaSiest conference will take place in Malmö on May 6-7 (English). ➡️ Added to the Swedish tech event calendar for PRO subscribers.

• The nominations for the annual angel investor event Angel Prize are open. The Swedish edition will take place on October 15 (English).

• An exclusive, invite-only longevity conference will take place in June in Stockholm, hosted by Ash Pournouri, creator of Brilliant Minds, and led by longevity biohacker and entrepreneur Bryan Johnson (English, Swedish).

• Pinecone Ventures, Norway-based venture studio which just expanded into Sweden, welcomes Ellie Fokas-Schuettinger as Stockholm-based Partner and COO (English).

Selected Swedish tech startup jobs

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

• Various Engineering roles (Nordic Air Defence)
• Senior Legal Counsel (Neko Health)
• Senior Software Engineer (Improvin')
• Community & Expert Manager (Letterlife)
• Customer Success Manager (Imbox)
• Senior C# .NET Core Developer (The Intelligence Company)
• Various Engineering roles (Heart Aerospace)
• Senior Software Engineer (Datia)
• Operations Manager (OlsAro)

To the listings

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Microsoft will shut down Skype, which was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark. In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5B (English).

• Dealroom published the first part of a three part report titled "Accelerating Europe" (English).

• European startups produce billion-dollar companies at the same rate as US ones when measured per dollar invested (English).

• Payments giant Stripe declares it is “seeing an AI boom”, revealing that AI startups are growing more rapidly than traditional SaaS companies have historically. Among examples given is Lovable (English).

• Thanks to AI, there's a greenfield landgrab happening like we haven’t seen in a long time (English).

• A guide to SaaS pricing strategy (English).

• Founders who want to build something truly successful, need to have courage to be disliked (English).


• The Swedish government presented its STEM strategy (Swedish, machine translation).

• In Q4 2024, Sweden’s economy grew at the fastest pace since 2022 (English).

• A proposed bill would force messaging services to create backdoors for Swedish security services. Signal says they'd rather leave Sweden than to comply (English, Swedish).

• Popular Swedish legal databases may be forced to close down after a ruling by the Supreme Court, stating that these sites no longer are allowed to share criminal judgments with paying customers (Swedish, machine translation).

• In 14 countries including Sweden, Google is making it easier for users to protect and remove their personal information from Search results (English).

• Oslo-based Schibsted Media has agreed to acquire the Swedish TV company TV4 from Nordic and Baltic telco Telia (English, Swedish).

• Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital ranks #5 in Newsweek's annual World's Best Hospitals list (English).

• The Swedish Chamber of Commerce's "Pre Loved indicator" shows that second hand sales in Sweden reached SEK1.5B in January 2025, up 20% YoY (Swedish).