News December 21, 2022: Ekkono, LEIA, NODA, Curb Food, Momang, Radinn, Techstars Stockholm and more

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

Funding news

• Ekkono (Varberg, embedded edge machine learning library, purpose-built for IoT): €2.5M ($2.7M) mix of grant & equity from EIC Accelerator (English).
• LEIA (Stockholm, health app for new mothers): SEK14M (€1.3M, $1.3M) from People Ventures, Norrsken and Unconventional Ventures. Previous investors The Case For Her, Liseno and Octaquest also participated (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).
• NODA (Karlshamn, AI solutions for optimization of district energy grids and for energy efficiency in buildings): SEK5M (€450K, $480K) from previous investor CapSek and other undisclosed investors, for the continued expansion in the German market as well as into the UK and US (Swedish, machine translation).

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

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Curb Food, Stockholm-based dark kitchen operator founded in 2020, is shutting down due to the "uniquely weak capital market". The company has raised €23.2M (Swedish, machine translation).
• Momang, Stockholm-based SaaS competence selling tool for consultants and advisors, is now using generative AI to automatically create project descriptions for its users' CVs (English). When I asked co-founder and CEO Linda Wennerström for a demo, she actually recorded a "personalized" video showing the tool in action.
• Interview with Mathias Bergman, CEO of Malmö-based maker of electric boards for water sports Radinn, on the path and the challenges of scaling up the company from being a toy for the yachting people — to reaching the mass-market (English).
• Techstars Stockholm is looking for a Program Manager (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Antler published a generative AI market map including over 160 platforms (English).
• Despite an ugly environment for public listings, cloud database company MariaDB went public at the NYSE through a SPAC. CEO Michael Howard's reasoning for the move: The alternative of remaining private and "begging investors for cash is a horrible place to be right now" (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Danish wind power giant Orsted A/S will make green shipping fuel at new big plant to be constructed in Sweden (English / Bloomberg paywall, alternative URL).
• Gothenburg is getting a direct flight connection to New York, operated by SAS and starting in April 2023 (English, Swedish).

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That's it for today.