News December 8, 2022: petgood, Enerpoly, VOI, KTH Innovation pre-incubator program, Modal, Sleep Cycle and more

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

Funding news

• petgood (Stockholm, producer and seller of insect-based pet food): SEK27.5M (€2.5M, $2.6M) from new investor, Swedish company group Axel Johnson via its foodtech investment vehicle FoodBridge, with participation from existing investors, including Course Corrected (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall, Swedish #2).
• Enerpoly (Stockholm, developer of sustainable and rechargeable batteries): $1.5M seed round from existing investors and new angel investors including Fredrik Sidhagen (CEO of RCO Group), Johan Nord (previously CCO at Trustly), as well as bankers Eirik Winter, Malin Engman and André Rhodin. The company plans to use the funds to finance upcoming pilot projects that demonstrate the zinc-ion battery technology (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

• After a smaller round of layoffs during summer, VOI is cutting 130 jobs (around 70 of which are full-time roles), which represents around 13% of the workforce (English, Swedish).
• 17 very early-stage startups/projects are part of the latest batch of the KTH Innovation pre-incubator program (English).
• Swedish software engineer Erik Bernhardsson, who built up the core of Spotify's music recommendation system, has founded the New York-based software startup Modal. It promises data teams to let them run a variety of processes in the cloud "without having to think about infrastructure" (English).
• Sleep Cycle, Gothenburg-based company offering sleep tracking solutions, announced launching on Huawei smartphones in China, which means 100 million new potential users (English).
• Sifted will hold a "Sifted Sessions" event in Stockholm on 8 March 2023. The goal of the event is to "connect startups, investors and operators to break new ground". Lots of well-known speakers are already confirmed (English).
• Creandum's Fredrik Cassel and Northzone's Pär-Jörgen Pärson are the 2 Swedes on Forbes' "Midas list Europe" for 2022 – described as the "definitive ranking of the top 25 tech investors in Europe, Israel and the Middle East" (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Airtable's path to product-market fit – lessons for building horizontal products (English).
• How to handle a tough board meeting (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• A list of the 100 companies that pay the highest average salaries in Sweden in 2022 (Swedish / PDF).
• Due to a fire risk and other technical problems, the City of Stockholm is removing its troubled fleet of station-based ebikes for a few weeks from the capital's streets, to fix the problems (Swedish, machine translation).
• According to an annual survey, the AI use case for which Swedes say they would be most interested in, is reducing their housing costs; particularly the energy consumption component (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.