News August 11, 2022: Yepstr, Kavall, Imagimob, Bitrefill, Readly and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, exclusively for subscribers of Swedish Tech News.

Funding news

• Yepstr (Stockholm, gig worker marketplace for household chores): undisclosed amount from undisclosed investors. In 2021, the company grew revenue 586% compared to 2020, to SEK8M (€770K, $800K) (Swedish, machine translation).

>> 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

• Kavall, Stockholm-based hyper-local rapid grocery delivery service, is "pausing" its activities on the Finnish market to reduce its burn rate (Swedish, machine translation).
• Stockholm-based Imagimob launched a "free forever plan" for its tinyML machine learning at-the-edge platform, which it hopes will bring the technology to a new audience. Users will have access to the full functionality of the platform, but will have a limitation in compute credits (English).
• Stockholm-based Bitrefill, which lets people buy gift cards and refill phones with cryptocurrencies and thereby "live on crypto", reports that a recently launched feature for US users to pay credit card bills with crypto, is taking off - albeit without naming concrete numbers (English).

Swedish tech earnings reports

• Readly (Växjö, subscription service for digital magazines) during Q2 increased revenue 30% YoY to SEK144.1M (€14M, $14.3M). The operating result was SEK-28.2M, compared to SEK-54.3M in Q2 2021 (English, Swedish).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• 📺 "You should never do a 10% layoff. It's not consequential enough to really affect your burn rate, and yet you go through all the pain as if you had done 30% or 40%", says seasoned Silicon Valley investor Bill Gurley in this video on surviving downturns (from 2013) (English, 15 minutes).
• Startups, if your CEO isn’t running your fundraising, you’re doing it wrong (English).
• The increasing number of remote workers is - at least in the US - leading to the "rise of the side startup": People use lunch breaks and lulls at their main jobs to work on their own startup businesses (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Only 9% of Swedes said they had experienced anger in the day on which they were surveyed, according to the Gallup World Emotions Survey, making the nation calmer than most other nations in Europe (English).
• Sweden is now Europe's biggest exporter of power, as the previous #1 France struggles with extended outages at its nuclear power fleet (English / Bloomberg soft paywall, alternative URL).

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That's it for today.