News April 1, 2022: Dropmed, VIDEM, Astrid, Yubico, Stockholm Exergi and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector.

Note: This issue is free of April Fools' jokes.

Financing rounds

• Dropmed (Stockholm, online marketplace for medical technology): SEK3M (€290K, $320K) from Add Health Media, Pluscap and Swedish physicist and astronaut Christer Fuglesang (English).

>> Daily updated, subscriber-exclusive Google sheet with all funding rounds raised by private Swedish startups and scaleups. Request access.

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Gothenburg-based startup VIDEM, which works on a small, handheld and low-cost molecular diagnostic device for infection detection, won this year's Almi Pitch event (Swedish, machine translation).
• Astrid Education, Stockholm-based maker of an AI-powered voice-based English learning solution for kids and teens, announced its expansion into the South Korean market (English).
• Christopher Harrell, CTO at Stockholm- and Silicon Valley-based provider of secure login solutions Yubico, published an article reviewing the status quo of open authentication standards, and sharing what the future holds for modern WebAuthn/FIDO authentication (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• A filterable list of (currently) 177 climate tech VCs (English).
• Signs that an entrepreneur is over-prepared for meetings with investors (English).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• Stockholm Exergi, Stockholm municipality's energy company, received €180M from the EU’s Innovation Fund for its plan to build Europe’s first large-scale negative emissions plant (English, Swedish).
• Sweden is one of the most active countries experimenting with geofencing for general traffic (English / NYT soft paywall, alternative URL).
• A pandemic baby bump shines a spotlight on the Nordic welfare model (English / Bloomberg paywall, alternative URL).

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That's it for today.