News December 22, 2022: Fudd, Airpelago, Leeroy, Ablemind and more

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

Turns out, there are enough news to justify a newsletter even today.

Funding news

• Fudd (Stockholm, inventory financing solution for vehicle dealers): SEK57M (€5.2M, $5.5M) from Svea Bank, Gustaf Hagman as well as previous investors Philian and Tacito Holding. The round was raised at a post-money valuation of SEK335M. The company was founded in 2019 by Wilhelm Westerman and Oscar Svensson and has so far raised a total of around SEK130M (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Airpelago (Gothenburg, support software for efficient inspections of linear infrastructure with drones): SEK8.5M (€770K, $820K) in a funding round led by existing investor VEQ, with participation from Sustainable Energy Angels, We Are Angels and several of Airpelago’s employees. The fresh funds will be used for the international expansion (English).

>> 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

• Leeroy, Sundsvall-based company founded in 2007 that offers software solutions for the restaurant industry, has filed for bankruptcy. In August 2021, Leeroy raised SEK40M, the company's most recent funding round (Swedish, machine translation).
• The solution of Malmö-based startup Ablemind, which consists of an AI-powered clinical method to detect and measure mental illness, will this Christmas help the volunteers of Swedish charity organisation Mind to identify people at risk who are calling the suicide hotline (Swedish, machine translation).
• At least 22 new first-time funds have been launched in the Nordic region from January to December of 2022, targeting almost €1B in assets under management (AUM) combined (English).
• Inventure's Rebecka Löthman Rydå and Lauri Kokkila published an analysis of the key drivers for and most important bottom-up trends related to the energy transformation (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Guide for scientist founders to spin out companies of academia. It's in parts US specific but as Pale Blue Dot's Hampus Jakobsson points out: "The TTOs license isn't an issue in Sweden so there should be 10x deep tech startups in Sweden" (English).
• "Programming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of 'writing a program' is headed for extinction, and indeed, [...] most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed" (English).
• The launch and instant popularity of ChatGPT led Google’s management to declare a "code red", which was akin to pulling the fire alarm (English / NYT paywall, alternative URL).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• The Swedish Government is working on a plan for a state-run digital identification system which also would comply with the European Union's security requirements (Swedish, machine translation).
• Reindeer herders fear Arctic industry boom (English).

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That's it for today.