Swedish Tech Weekly #354: Univrses, Colive, Learnster, Legora, Modvion, Moleculent, Redpine, Swimbird, Tavion, Argus Eye, Zellify, Atech, Tenet Industries, Biodiv, Brayns, QTPIE, MagasinX, Vividon, Carateu, Finforge, GottLr, 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.

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• Univrses (Stockholm, AI-powered live maps for urban and highway management): Pirelli, the Italian multinational tyre manufacturer, acquired a 30% stake, and has the option to reach a majority stake (English). ➡️ The deal included significant funding for Univrses. More details covered in PRO.

• Colive (Stockholm, provider of coliving hubs) has been acquired by the newly formed Stockholm-based strategic holding and growth platform for European coliving operators NestFrame (English).

• Learnster (Stockholm, personalized learning management system and AI tools for organizations) acquired the learning technology company Learnify Tools from the Swedish edtech company Learnify (English).

Send press releases about funding rounds, and other potentially relevant news, to news@swedishtechnews.com.

• Legora (Stockholm, collaborative AI platform for lawyers): $50M Series D extension from Atlassian and NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, among others (funding details page).

• Modvion (Gothenburg, developer of modular wind turbine towers in laminated wood): up to €39.1M ($46M) grant from the EU Innovation Fund (English).

• Moleculent (Stockholm, pioneering functional profiling to map cell-cell communication at scale in human tissue): $20M in a funding round led by Rubicon Healthcare Partners (funding details page).

• Redpine (Stockholm; platform that connects AI builders and agents to proprietary, licensed multimodal data): $8M in a seed funding round led by NordicNinja, with participation from Luminar Ventures, node.vc, and angel investors (funding details page). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in March 2025.

• Swimbird (Stockholm; B2B SaaS solution for wealth management): SEK86M (€7.9M, $9.2M) in a funding round led by the asset manager 7RIDGE (Swedish, machine translation, funding details page). ➡️ Partial closing of this round previously covered in PRO.

• Tavion (Stockholm; operates, owns and develops battery parks across Europe): SEK76M ( €7M, $8.2M) in pre-seed funding from Course Corrected, BackingMinds, Carl Manneh, and Tavion co-founder and CEO Emad Zand. Tavion's first market will be Poland (funding details page).

• Argus Eye (Linköping, sensor solutions for real-time monitoring of biological systems and processes): €3.3M ($3.9M) in a funding round from existing investors Voima Ventures and Eir Ventures, and new investor Impilo Partners Invest (funding details page). ➡️ Funding first covered in PRO on February 16.

• Zellify (Stockholm, AI-native growth platform for subscription apps): $3.7M seed round led by UK-based Connect Ventures (funding details page). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in December 2023.

• Atech (Stockholm & Copenhagen, AI platform that makes hardware development accessible to everyone): $800K in pre-seed funding led by Emblem and Nordic Makers (funding details page). ➡️ Startup covered in PRO in February 23.

• Tenet Industries (Stockholm; designs and manufactures low-cost mass-manufacturable strike drones): $500K from Y Combinator, as the startup recently was accepted into the spring program. Here is an interview with co-founder and CEO Hugo Frisk (English). ➡️ Startup and YC participation first covered in PRO on April 8.

• Biodiv (Umeå; platform for advanced biodiversity calculation): €250K ($300K) in first funding led by Partnerinvest Norr (funding details page). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in November 2025.

• Brayns (Stockholm, AI autopilot for compliance): undisclosed amount in first funding from Wellstreet (funding details page). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in August 2025.

• [PRO last week] A platform that delivers cloud agility on a customer's own infrastructure, raised first funding.

• [PRO last week] An AI-powered energy optimization platform for retail, real estate, and industry, raised first unannounced funding.

• [PRO last week] An intelligence platform for profitable EV charging networks also raised first funding, yet-to-be-announced.

• [PRO last week] Several Swedish VC firms announced investments in non-Swedish startups.

I covered many more funding rounds, and more details for each, in Swedish Tech News PRO last week.

Startup founders only: Request free access to my funding and investor database. Useful during your fundraising process.

• QTPIE (soon to be named Sapios), Stockholm-based developer of automatic driving evaluations using AI and eye tracking, has secured a $5M contract with the US state of Virginia. 27 other states are in the pipeline, says founder Ravi Teja Chadalavada. ➡️ PRO subscribers learned details about the company's fundraising plans.

• MagasinX, founded by Greens Ventures' Dan McCormick, is establishing a 15,000 sqm physical AI hardware lab at the old Ford factory at Stockholm's Frihamnen (Swedish, machine translation). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO on March 9.

• Vividon, based in Stockholm, launched its first product: an AI-powered Photoshop plugin for relighting images directly inside professional creative workflows (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO on December 9.

• Raiha Buchanan and David Hansson, two founders of Swedish fintech Gigapay, have founded Carateu, a curated online store for buying certified natural and lab-grown diamonds in Europe (English).

• Finforge, an Uppsala-based platform for "building AI trading strategies that hold up live", has launched (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO on January 9.

• Also launched: GottLr, a Tinder-like app for for swiping recipes. ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO on November 26.

• Lovable scored the first spot in the new Scaling Europe 50 ranking, which ranks the top 50 fastest-growing private technology companies in Europe, "without relying on vanity metrics or stale data". Three more Swedish companies made it: Legora (#4), Tandem Health (#11), and Lassie (#30) (English).

• Lovable launched a mobile app for iOS and Android (English).

• CodeScene, Malmö-based maker of a code analysis and visualization tool, has launched CodeHealth MCP Server, promising to ensure "that agents and AI coding assistants write maintainable, production-ready code without introducing technical debt" (English).

• Adsorbi, Gothenburg-based biomaterials startup, announced its first product designed for removing gaseous pollutants in recirculating airflow systems (English).

• DanAds, Stockholm-based provider of self-serve and automation advertising technology founded in 2013, is reportedly for sale (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• A coalition of primarily Swedish investors, corporations and high-growth startups, coordinated by Norrsken, is calling on the EU to adopt the vision of "becoming the world's first electro-continent, making the EU the Electro-Union" (English).

• In Q1, SMEs in Sweden increased external spending on AI services by 264% YoY, according to Mynt, Anthropic accounted for 34.5% of AI spending, closely followed by Open AI at 33.6% (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• This year's Startup 4 Climate competition will be launched on May 21. As usual, SEK2M are up for grabs for Swedish startups and scaleups that speed up the energy transition (English).

• A Drone Defense Hackathon will take place on May 7 in Stockholm (English).

• Södra, the Swedish forest industry group, is discontinuing its corporate VC firm Södra Ädla (English).

• Almi Invest is hiring a Communication and Marketing Manager in Stockholm (Swedish).

• [PRO last week] We have another new addition to the Depict mafia, i.e. a new startup founded by a former Depict employee.

• [PRO last week] The founder and former CEO of an AI-native compliance startup is now building something to "counter offensive cyber capabilities".

• [PRO last week] A startup that creates, licenses, and protects authentic human sound, is raising a first larger funding round.

• [PRO last week] The future of a VC-backed Swedish fintech partly based in San Francisco is unclear, as the Swedish entity has been liquidated, and the CEO and co-founder has left.

• [PRO last week] A platform for immersive and interactive live entertainment at home, is bankrupt, after having raised around SEK60M in funding.

• [PRO last week] A developer of software and AI solutions for the defense sector that so far has kept a low profile, increased net revenue 750% YoY to over SEK40M, while generating a profit.

I covered many more news – many of which have not been reported elsewhere – and more details for each, in Swedish Tech News PRO last week.

You can upgrade to a PLUS or PRO plan, to get access to the following features:

• Vitalis – May 4-7 – Gothenburg
• SaaSiest – May 5-6 – Malmö
• First Gate Invest Investerarforum – May 5 – Västerås
• Uminova VentureMatch – May 5 – Umeå
• Stockholm Climate Tech Summit – May 6 – Stockholm
• Data Innovation Summit – May 6-8 – Stockholm

For more major and flagship events, check the Swedish tech event calendar.

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

• Various incl. Chief of Staff, Product Designer, AI Researcher (Lovable)
• Founding Engineer (Hardware) (cota)
• Various incl. Forest Portfolio Manager, Monitoring Manager, Data Engineer (EKEN)
• Account Executive (Hedda)
• Senior Business Development Representative (Proxify)
• Business-minded Controller (Yangi)

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.

• AI is killing one specific business model: charging $50-150 per seat per month for software that increasingly looks like something a model can do. But: AI is minting a different business model (English).

• The AI industry in the US is discovering that the public hates it (English).

• Sweden ranks #5 in this year's Press Freedom Index, down from #4 last year (English).

• The parliament approved the new citizenship law, with no transitional rules for pending cases (English).

• In Malmö, a physical video rental store has opened – currently the only one in Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).

• Apple unsuccessfully tried to get a sustainability-focused non-profit association in southern Sweden to change its logo (Swedish, machine translation).

• Q1 2026 saw plugin EVs take 64.9% share in Sweden, up from 58.0% in Q1 2025 (English).

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

Martin