News February 5, 2024: Populum, Nordkap, Safety by Cilia, Copabet, EdAider, Gofrendly, Knodd, Second Opinion, Forever 89, FinSquid, Personalkollen, Yazen, and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Populum (Stockholm, employee survey platform, founded 2015) is being acquired by Norway-headquartered cloud-based HR software provider CatalystOne Solutions. The purchase price was not disclosed. According to the press release, Populum grew its ARR by 70% in 2023, and it's now at SEK22M (€2M, $2.1M) (English, Swedish). Populum has not raised any outside funding. I covered the company in October as "under-the-radar startup of the day".

Funding news

⬜️ publicly traded

• Nordkap (Stockholm, SaaS for real estate treasury management, founded 2011): SEK10M (€890K, $960K) from existing investors. This new cash injection will be used for the continued international expansion, and to reach profitability this year (Swedish, machine translation). Total funding registered with Bolagsverket previously (excluding the new round) amounts to around SEK75M, raised from NFT Ventures, Stronghold, Neptunia Invest, Malmkroppen, among others. For 2022, Nordkap reported net revenue of SEK13.5M (vs SEK11.9M in 2021), and a loss of -SEK9.9M (vs -SEK8.8M in 2021).
• Safety by Cilia (Stockholm, personal safety alarm solution discretely integrated into jewelry, founded 2022): SEK5M (€440K, $480K) from angel investors, at a pre-money valuation of SEK38M, co-founder and CEO Cissi Nilsson tells me. The startup secured this funding just as Nibye, another Swedish protagonist in this sector (which was mostly bootstrapped), went bankrupt. Funding news continue below...