News April 12, 2022: Quinyx, Material Exchange, Charge Amps, Zevoy, John Henric, Hive Streaming, Palats, The Train Brain, Spotify and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Quinyx (Stockholm, provider of workforce management solutions) acquired UK-based employee engagement, store operations and task management platform Concrete. According to DI Digital, Quinyx paid around SEK300M (€29M, $32M) in cash and equity (English, Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2)

Financing rounds

• Material Exchange (Stockholm, digital marketplace for sourcing materials and components for footwear and apparel): €25M ($27M) in a Series A round led by Molten Ventures, with previous seed investors including Partech, Inventure, Norrsken, Lyra and Day One Capital all participating (English).
• Charge Amps (Stockholm, manufacturer of smart charging solutions for electric vehicles): SEK150M (€14.5M, $15.8M) from new investors Concejo, LMK and Quinary Investment, as well as from existing investors OK ekonomisk förening, Skellefteå Kraft and Swedbank Robur (English, Swedish).
• Zevoy (Finnish-Swedish all-in-one expense management solution): SEK150M (€14.5M, $15.8M) in a Series A round led by Blossom Capital, with participation from existing investors Maki.vc and Brightly Ventures (English, Swedish / DI Digital paywall).
• John Henric (Malmö, direct-to-consumer men's fashion brand): SEK70M (€6.8M, $7.4M) from eEquity (English, Swedish).
• Hive Streaming (Stockholm, employee engagement video streaming solution): SEK25M (€2.4M, $2.6M) from existing investor Verdane (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Palats (Gothenburg, digital platform for circular material- & inventory management): SEK4.4M (€430K, $460K) from Länsförsäkringar Göteborg och Bohuslän, previous investor Chalmers Ventures, and angel investor Adam Nilsson (Swedish, machine translation).
• Creandum co-led a $9M seed round raised by German supply chain API platform Procuros (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

• The Train Brain, Stockholm-based startup building AI-models for safe and reliable trains and buses, launched "Railbot the Chatbot" on Facebook Messenger - a bot which promises to provide train passengers with more accurate information about delays and expected arrivals (Swedish, machine translation).
• As rumored previously, Spotify starts to integrate the live audio capabilities from its companion app, Spotify Greenroom, within the main Spotify streaming app. Greenroom rebrands as “Spotify Live" (English).
• Stockholm-based podcast company Acast is under fire for sending spam to attract new podcasters to its platform (English, scroll down a bit)
• Karlshamn-based Skolon, a platform for schools to access digital educational tools, plans a public listing at Nasdaq's First North Growth Market during Q2 2022 (Swedish, machine translation).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• European venture investment maintained momentum in Q1 2022 (English).
• An angel investor's lessons learned from having invested in failed scaleup Fast (English, Twitter thread).
• How to get a VC's attention at an IRL event (English).

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That's it for today.‌

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