News April 4, 2022: Vembla, dingdong, Go North, Qoitech, Planhat, Budbee, Vourity, Ligna Energy, Binance and more

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

Mergers and acquisitions

• Vembla (Stockholm, instant grocery home delivery) acquires selected assets such as the customer database and the dark stores of Stockholm-based competitor dingdong in an equity deal. The price was not disclosed. Just "a few" of dingdong's around 10 employees will join Vembla (Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).

Financing rounds

• Go North (Gothenburg, e-commerce aggregator aiming to acquire and scale brands on Amazon and beyond): SEK77.5M (€7.5M, $8.3M) in a seed round led by eEquity, with participation from angel investors Alexander Hars, Ludwig Mattsson, Victor Hielte, Caroline Ingeborn, Peter Lindholm, Lena Apler, Magnus Emilson, William & Kim Olsson, Gustav Eriksson, Sujay Tyle, and Karin Hallin (English, Swedish).
• Qoitech (Lund, hardware and software solutions for design of energy-efficient products): SEK5M (€480K, $530K) in a funding round led by Nudging Capital, with participation from Deeptech Seed Fund, and Curitas Ventures (English, Swedish).
• Creandum participated in a €15M seed funding round raised by German fintech lemon.markets, which offers an API for stock trading (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

• Kaveh Rostampor and Niklas Skog, founders of Stockholm-based customer success platform Planhat, bootstrapped their startup to more than 100 employees. Now they do consider raising external funds to grow even faster (English / Sifted paywall, alternative URL).
• Budbee signed a major contract with Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn and e-commerce company Bol.com to create the largest network of smart package lockers in the Benelux countries (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish companies Vourity and Ligna Energy have been named among the world’s top 15 most innovative companies within the field of IoT in the 2022 IoT Innovation World Cup (English).
• Orderhero is postponing its planned public listing until the startup has fixed the tax compliance issues that recently surfaced surrounding one of the startup's products (Swedish, machine translation).
• The global crypto exchange Binance, which already is available to customers in Sweden, is expanding formally into the Swedish market by applying for a registration as "financial institution" with Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority (Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).
• Klarna has completed the acquisition of PriceRunner (English, Swedish).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• SoftBank to slow investments following crash in tech holdings (English / FT paywall, alternative URL).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• New care sales in Sweden during March 2022 dropped by 40% compared to March 2021. 56% of cars sold were EVs (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish EV maker Polestar received an order for delivery of up to 69,000 EVs from car rental company Hertz (English).
• Starting from later this month, Stockholm residents will be able to use a large fleet of station-based, public shared e-bikes. These will compete with commercial shared mobility operators, although offered at a much lower price for riders. Here are details (Swedish, machine translation).

+++

That's it for today.