News February 15, 2022: Noodl, Trustly, Filip Martinsson (Moralis), Isabelle Nyroth (GLOBHE), Acast, Eniro, Sleep Cycle and more

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

Financing rounds

• Noodl (Malmö, no-code software platform for product designers, innovators and developers): €1.5M ($1.7M) pre-seed round from 42CAP (English).
• Swedish VC firm EQT Ventures led a $10M funding round raised by German fine dining delivered to your door startup voilà (English).

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Trustly, facilitator of seamless bank payments, is laying off 120 of its 900 employees - most of them at its Stockholm headquarter - after a canceled IPO due to regulatory issues last year. The company also downsizes its growth ambitions, aiming now to become market leader in 10-12 markets instead of 30 (Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).
• The future of the metaverse is "a collection of different worlds built on blockchain", writes Filip Martinsson, co-founder and COO of Stockholm-based Web3 development platform Moralis (English).
• 🎧 Isabelle Nyroth, self-taught drone pilot and Head of drones at Stockholm-based drone data platform GLOBHE, shares her learnings and excitement about drones and the drone sector in this podcast interview (English, 45 minutes).
• Bonnier Ventures bought additional stock in Stockholm-based podcast company Acast for SEK150M, increasing its ownership to 12.3% (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish search engine operator Eniro generated sales of SEK212M in Q4 2021, which is the same as in Q4 2020, and an operating loss of SEK107M, largly due to a write-off to goodwill (Swedish, machine translation).
• Sleep Cycle, Gothenburg-based maker of a sleep tracking application, also released its financial numbers for Q4 2021 and the full year (Swedish, machine translation).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Finland-based iPhone refurbisher Swappie raised a $124M Series C round to scale in Europe (English).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• IKEA says it needs to recruit 700 tech specialists globally (Swedish, machine translation).
• Chinese equipment manufacturer Nuctech, which is blacklisted in the US due to national security concers, won a public tender to supply security screening devices at Stockholm's Arlanda airport (English, Swedish).

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That's it for today.