Swedish Tech Weekly #374: Listen Labs, Trustly, IPercept, Cellfion, Arkivia, Omnio, Aventix, Hydro Diagnostics, ZeroParallax, Voi, PZLR, Rebaba, Capable, Qirra, Cemvision, Arbon Earth, Float, 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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• Listen Labs, the San Francisco-based AI-first customer research platform co-founded and led by Swedish serial entrepreneur Alfred Wahlforss, is being acquired by Salesforce, in a deal rumoured to be worth $2B (English).

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

• Trustly (Stockholm, payments platform for digital account-to-account transactions): $40M+ from existing investors Nordic Capital and Alfvén & Didrikson (English).

• IPercept (Stockholm, solutions for automated diagnostics and monitoring of industrial equipment): $16.5M in a Series A funding round led by Isogon Ventures and 2150 (English).

• Cellfion (Stockholm; cellulose-based and PFAS-free membranes for hydrogen, battery and ion-separation technologies): €6.9M ($7.8M) in a funding round from an undisclosed Japan-based global company, and existing investors Voima Ventures, Almi Invest GreenTech and Klimatet Invest (English).

• Arkivia (Stockholm, client management system for law firms): SEK40M (€3.5M, $4M) in a funding round led by node.vc (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in October 2024.

• Omnio (Umeå, developing a biologic therapy that addresses the biology of wound healing and the root cause of why these wounds stay open): €2.9M ($3.3M) in funding from existing investors and shareholders (English).

• Aventix (Gothenburg, sensor-based analytical tools for laboratories): €1.2M ($1.35) in a pre-seed round led by Kost Capital and Voima Ventures (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in December 2025; funding first covered in PRO pre-announcement on September 11

• Hydro Diagnostics (Stockholm, lateral flow tests for rapid detection of bacteria in water): SEK3.4M (€300K, $340K) from a mix of new and existing investors, including the two Swedish football players Carl Starfelt and Jesper Karlström. The startup also secured a SEK1M loan from Almi (Swedish, machine translation)

• ZeroParallax (Åre, thermal monitoring and proprietary visual sensor technology for industrial settings): undisclosed amount in a seed funding round led by Momenta Ventures (English).

• Voi (Stockholm, e-scooter & micromobility operator, founded 2018) has entered into a new €150M revolving credit facility with Danske Bank, Swedbank, and DNB Sweden (English).

• [PRO last week] A Swedish AI infrastructure startup founded this year has raised yet-to-be-announced funding from a Swedish B2B software growth investor.

• [PRO last week] A startup developing a technology platform to help create the knowledge for new medicine development, raised first, yet-to-be-announced funding.

I covered many more funding rounds, and more details for each, in Swedish Tech News PRO last week. PRO is ideal for early-stage startup investors, and invite-only. Learn more.

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• Sweden's most active startup investors – I've updated the public Leaderboards, as I do at the beginning of each quarter. The top 3 angels this time: Mattias Miksche (#1), Sebastian Knutsson (#2), Fredrik Hjelm & Anton Osika (shared #3). The top 3 VCs: Almi Invest (#1), Antler (#2), and Wave Ventures (#3) (English).

• PZLR, based in Stockholm and founded last year (as Puzzlr), has exited stealth. The company offers a white-label puzzle game solution for global media brands, and says it has over 20 major media clients that already are live (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in April 2025

• Rebaba, the Stockholm-based maker of circular battery systems, is launching the Rebaba Home Battery – a 40 kWh system "built in Sweden using high-quality second-life EV batteries" (English).

• Capable, a new startup from Stockholm, has launched a CRM that users can run through their AI tool of choice, via MCP (English). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO on January 30.

• Qirra, from Stockholm, has launched a platform akin to Airbnb for storage and parking (Swedish). ➡️ Startup first covered in PRO in September 2025, silent launch covered in June 2026.

• Claes Kollberg, co-founder and CTO of Cemvision, is taking over as CEO at the Stockholm-based startup working on decarbonising cement. He succeeds Oscar Hållén, who joined the company in early 2023 (English). ➡️ PRO subscribers learned new details regarding latest funding.

• Arbon Earth, a Gothenburg-based climate tech startup, announced becoming the first company to receive official regulatory approval in Indonesia to conduct deep-sea marine carbon capture (English).

• Float, the Stockholm-based financing provider for European tech, has so far funded more than 150 companies and deployed more than €100M across 17 European countries, co-founder Jannis Koehn shares in this interview (English).

• Stegra needs more funding – again – to complete its fossil-free steel plant in northern Sweden. The company also announced that CEO Henrik Henriksson is stepping down, and will be succeeded by Håkan Buskhe (English).

• Raymond, Stockholm-based developer and installer of proprietary solar power systems adapted for the Nordic climate, is bankrupt, after raising over SEK70M in equity funding (English / STN PRO).

• Swedish nuclear startup Blykalla says it will use AI to accelerate the permitting process (English).

• Brite, Stockholm-based provider of payment solutions based on direct bank-to-bank technology, launched in the UK (English).

• Froda, Stockholm-based digital loan provider for small businesses, is launching in France, its eighth European market (English).

• Avionero, the Malmö-based travel search and planning engine, canceled its planned small IPO at the Spotlight Stock Market, as the minimum threshold for a required share issue has not been met (Swedish, machine translation).

• Payhawk, an eight-year-old Bulgaria-based AI-powered spend management platform, opened its Nordic headquarter in Stockholm (English, Swedish).

• Hemnet, Sweden's once unrivalled but lately challenged publicly traded property platform, is now copying the upstart Booli (owned by state-owned bank SBAB) by letting in free listings, after years of price increases and growing discontent (English). 

• Storytel, the publicly traded Swedish audiobook and ebook subscription service, is launching an online store for physical books in Sweden (English).

• Nordic Tech Week is hiring a Founders Associate (English).

• Skåne’s startup investment activity during the first half 2026 was weak, with both deal count and value coming in lower than during H1 2025 (English). ➡️ Based on data from the Startup Database by Swedish Tech News

• Øresund Startup Map, launched by Øresund Startup News, puts the whole ecosystem across Skåne and Copenhagen in one place (English).

• J12, the Swedish early stage VC firm, made two early scout investments in Lovable, and recently sold part of its stake for SEK80M, at a 225x return (Swedish / Di paywall).

• Willard Ahdritz, Swedish founder of Kobalt Music Group and startup investor, has officially launched Ahdritz Capital Partners (ACP), a music and media technology investment firm based in New York and Stockholm. Isabel Keulen is joining as Investment Partner (English).

• [PRO last week] I covered 105 new Swedish startups last month, and added them to the Startup Database. Here are the top 10 most notable ones, including automation of dangerous machines, AI for chip design, hardware with senses, next generation banking, AI agent staffing agency for legal firms, and more (English).

• [PRO last week] A former VC has founded a physical AI startup based in Malmö, currently in stealth mode.

• [PRO last week] A repeat healthtech founder and former CEO of a biotech company is now building a digital care provider helping people to quit nicotine and lose weight – currently in stealth.

• [PRO last week] A new startup is developing and providing AI employees that hold specific functions in building companies.

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.

• Data & AI Stockholm, Summit 2026 – October 14 – Stockholm
A practitioner-first summit bringing together data professionals, AI builders, researchers, engineers, founders, and leaders from across the Nordic ecosystem

• Grow Invest - October 22 – Helsingborg
The annual invite-only event gathering investors, founders and operators, arranged by Mindpark

• Nordic Legal Tech Day – Oct 7 – Stockholm
• Space Sweden Summit 2026 – Oct 8 – Stockholm
• Kista Deeptech Day – Oct 8 – Stockholm
• Nordic APIs Platform Summit – Oct 12-14 – Stockholm
• Gothenburg Tech Week – Oct 12-16 – Gothenburg

For subsequent major/flagship events, check the Swedish tech event calendar.

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

• Various incl Systems Engineer, Head of People and Culture, Founding Designer (Airon)
• Various incl Director of Analysis, Financial Controller (Tavion)
• Commercial Co-founder (Unearth)
• CTO (QINDS)
• Unity Developer (Terrahutton)
• Member of the Technical Team (FRAVEK)
• Forward Deployed Engineer, Process Engineer (TERASi)
• Growth Engineer (Vesence)
• Founder Associate (Evora)
• Automation Lead (Taigatech)
• Process Engineer (LunaLEC)
• Software Engineer (LexEnergy)
• Agentic AI Engineer (Waya)
• Product Designer (Roaring)
• Enterprise Sales Lead (ComeBack)
• Senior Sales Manager, Direct Channel (Yabie)

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.

• The likelihood that startups are overfunded and overvalued working on a too small/niche problem while thinking they are building the next decacorn, is at its peak since 2021, argues Antler GP Tobias Bengtsdahl (English).

• "We are spending unprecedented sums to make intelligence cheap and abundant while underfunding the companies best positioned to use it" (English).

• It's never been a better time to be an enterprise software buyer, because extraction works way less than it used to (English).

• The only sensible policy for commenting on rumors: no comment (English).

• Registrations for Slovenia's national internet domain, .si, have surged after US President Donald Trump announced that his administration would replace the term artificial intelligence (AI) with super intelligence (SI) (English).

• Sweden defends the second position in WIPO’s Global Innovation Index 2026, only beaten by Switzerland (English).

• In 2026, six out of ten Swedes use AI services, according to Internetstiftelsen's annual report on Swedes' internet habits (English, Swedish).

• Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed an AI scientist capable of generating scientific hypotheses, designing experiments, and interpreting results (English).

• Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, has bought 15,000 hectares of forest in Härjedalen, Sweden, for SEK235M, from the paper company SCA (English, Swedish).

• The power demand from data centers that have applied for grid connection in Sweden, combined with capacity that has already been reserved for data centers that are not yet operational, amounts to over 10,000 MW—equivalent to about ten large nuclear reactors (Swedish / Di paywall).

• Duscha.nu is a little web tool built by David Sjunnesson that shows the cost of a shower, based on the energy cost at a given moment in one's location (English).

• Swedish software developer Joel Hägvall has built a browser-based simulator of Stockholm's subway, using real-time train movements (Swedish).

• The Swedish police has a message for anyone who thinks they’re talking to spam callers: Hang up the phone, and embrace being rude (English, Swedish).

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

Martin

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