Swedish Tech Weekly #329: Legora, Cellcolabs, Vesence, Grasp, Court22, Vendy, PlayWellMinds, Winterkeep, Sajkla, Utilifeed, Andon Labs, Klimra, SpectraWatch, Polytope, Maybe Baby, Blue Ocean Closures, and more

Welcome to the latest from Sweden's startup & tech sector.

I'm Martin Weigert. Every Monday morning, Swedish Tech Weekly brings you a selection of some of the news I previously covered in my PRO newsletters, which are available as daily and weekly version. Today's newsletter was sent to 3114 subscribers.

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Mergers & acquisitions

• Nordic Capital, Stockholm-headquartered PE firm, acquired the UK-based startup BMLL, which provides data and analytics "to the world’s most sophisticated capital market participants" (English).

Funding news

Sweden-based startup founders, request free access to my funding and investor database + tech event calendar.

• Legora (Stockholm, collaborative AI platform for lawyers): $150M in a Series C funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners (Details page).

• Cellcolabs (Stockholm, manufactures GMP-certified mesenchymal stromal cells in Sweden for pre-clinical and clinical research): $12M from Titian Capital (Details page).

• Vesence (Stockholm & San Francisco, AI agent platform for law firms within Microsoft Office): $9M seed round led by Emergence, with participation from Creandum, Y Combinator, 20VC, and angel investors (Details page). ➡️ Company first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on January 28.

• Grasp (Stockholm, AI analyst for finance): $7M Series A funding round led by Octopus Ventures (Details page).

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• Court22 (Borlänge, digital platform for racket sports players and venues): SEK18M (€1.65M, $1.9M) led by existing investors, for the international expansion (Swedish, machine translation).

• Vendy (Stockholm, automated kiosks allowing people to sell their phone and get paid in seconds): €1M in a funding round led by Bust and Antler (Details page). ➡️ Funding first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on September 15.

• PlayWellMinds (Stockholm, app for mental training for young people): SEK10M (€900K, $1.1M) from existing and new angel investors (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Winterkeep (Umeå, game studio). SEK10M (€900K, $1.05M) from Behold Ventures (Details page). ➡️ Funding first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on September 30.

• Sajkla (greater Skövde area, circular furniture platform for businesses): SEK3M (€270K, $320K) from existing and new investors including Nordic Ignite, Skaraborg Invest, RadCap, and Fundforward, among others (Details page)

• Utilifeed (Gothenburg, SaaS platform for district heating utility providers and building owners): undisclosed amount from the existing investors Hafslund and Eidsiva (Details page)

• 103 Swedish tech startups have been awarded grants of in most cases SEK500K each from Vinnova, Sweden's innovation agency (English – scroll down a bit).

More funding rounds, and more details, covered in Swedish Tech News PRO last week.

PRO subscribers also get full access to the Startup Database by Swedish Tech News, packed with high quality curated data.

News from the Swedish startup & tech sector

• Andon Labs, Swedish YC-backed AI startup formerly known as Vectorview, tasked LLM-controlled robots to pass butter, and do other delivery tasks in household settings. The verdict: "State of the art models struggle, with the best model scoring 40% at Butter-Bench, compared to 95% for humans" (English).

• Klimra, Stockholm-based startup that offers an automated train travel reimbursement service, conducted a study picked up by major media outlets, which concludes that state-owned Swedish train company SJ "saved nearly SEK100M last year because passengers didn’t claim their compensation for train delays" (English).

• Brief profile of SpectraWatch, Stockholm-based startup founded earlier this year, which is developing security solutions to protect airspace from unsolicited drone activity (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Company first covered in Swedish Tech News PRO on September 4.

• PopBy, based in Stockholm, launched the iOS beta app for its new social network, "built on top of the real world". It's "the most naive and bold thing I have ever had the plasure of being terrified to do", writes co-founder Johan Kristensson (English). ➡️ Company first covered in PRO on July 29.

• Polytope, Stockholm-based dev tech startup founded five years ago, is launching an orchestration platform for coding AI agents (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Maybe Baby, Stockholm-based startup founded offering at-home diagnostic testing "that demystifies fertility and hormonal health", won the pitch competition at last weeks Nordic Fe:male Invest Summit (English). ➡️ Company first covered in PRO in June 2024.

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• Blue Ocean Closures, Karlstad-based developer of cellulose fiber based caps and lids that are recyclable as paper, claims that its latest generation of caps "can now be produced at equal or lower material cost than fossil-based plastic, while also cutting energy consumption in production by up to 90 percent" (English).

• Matpriskollen, a startup from western Sweden which offers a mobile app for comparing grocery prices, is launching in Denmark – the first step outside of Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).

• Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, dined with Swedish startup leaders from Lovable, Voi and Kry in Stockholm. Technology regulation and European competitiveness were reportedly the two overarching themes (English / Sifted paywall).

• Energy startups and scaleups can currently apply for grant funding of up to SEK500K and SEK3M respectively from the Swedish Energy Agency (English).

• Joseph Michael keeps updating the original Stockholm Startup & VC ecosystem map, and got another boost for it with a highly viral LinkedIn post (English).

• Arvid Lunnemark, the Swedish co-founder of the US-based startup Anysphere – maker of the popular AI assistant Cursor most recently valued at $9.9B – is leaving the company (English).

• Klarna will launch a global subscription membership program that includes two tiers offering cash back, travel perks, lifestyle rewards and other premium benefits (English).

• Daya Ventures, Gothenburg-based femtech venture studio, launched an equity crowdfunding round, and immediately shot through the target of €250K (English).

Exclusives in PRO last week

• A Swedish VC firm and an US investor provided over €3M in yet-to-be-announced first funding for a new high-profile Swedish startup.

• An energy scaleup that raised over SEK120M in equity funding, is bankrupt.

• A vibe-coding platform for mobile game prototypes is currently raising a first funding round of €2.5M.

• A serial entrepreneur is developing a solution for AI-enhanced live sports video.

• A quantum computing startup is preparing for a seed round in Q2 2026.

• A startup mentioned in this newsletter, just raised close to SEK1M in first funding from SSE Ventures and a European climate tech angel network.

• 26 new Swedish tech startups

Selected Swedish tech startup jobs

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

• Head of Product (Grasp)
• CEO (Depict)
• Sales Development Representative (Agaton)
• Operations and Data Analyst (Centi)
• Customer Operations Coordinator (DigiProc)
• Operational Buyer (Foodtel)
• Co-founder (Repit Fitness)
• Head of Operations (Done)
• Software Engineer (Uniplay)
• Experienced Battery Materials Engineer (Westra)
• Financial Accountant (Lovable)
• Finnish Speaking Junior Customer Success Manager (Tendium)
• Senior Software Engineer (Quickbutik)
• Various, including Founding AI Engineer and Founding Full-Stack Developer (epiminds)
• Various, including Product Designer and Client Manager (Podspace)
• Sales Executive (Talentium)
• UGC & Music Video Specialist (Amuse)
• Growth Marketing Executive (Hubert)
• Talent Partner Europe (Magma)
• GoLang Developer (Digiexam)
• Various Engineering roles; Operations Manager (Skye)

To the listings

Special shout-out to my partner Eivora for providing me with access to their awesome AI-powered ownership database of Swedish companies.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• The "AI-native startup playbook", published by Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Osika, with input from the founders of Stripe, Supabase, and Mercury (English).

• The application for the Germany-headquartered EWOR accelerator, which aims to challenge Y Combinator and has backed a number of Swedish startups lately, are open (English).

• Investors are urging portfolio companies to raise more capital before an expected crash in the AI fundraising market (English / Sifted paywall).

• Europe’s VCs are spending much faster than they are raising (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Sweden can now be considered a cashless society, according to a new study (Swedish, machine translation).

• There are now more than 500K electric vehicles registered in Sweden. That's around 10% of all cars, and represents a 26.8% YoY increase (Swedish, machine translation).

• A strike of 70 car mechanics at Tesla's ten Swedish service centres over the US carmaker's refusal to sign a collective agreement, has reached its second anniversary, and there is little prospect of a resolution (English).

• In what appears to be a ransomware attack, hackers have stolen 280 gigabytes of data from Swedish power grid operator Svenska Kraftnät (English, Swedish).

• Total book sales in Sweden increased by 10.7% YoY during Q3. For the first time, all sales channels – e-books, physical bookstores, digital subscription services and grocery stores – increased at the same time (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for this week. Thank you for being a subscriber!

Martin