News February 3, 2022: Yabie, Annotell, Billhop, Fundler, House:ID, Duearity, Trade Republic and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Yabie (Stockholm, flexible and mobile POS & payment platform) acquired Karlstad-based competitor Cash IT. Financial terms were not disclosed (Swedish, machine translation).

Financing rounds

• Annotell (Gothenburg, productivity platform for developing safe perception systems for autonomous mobility): $24M in a Series A round co-led by Metaplanet and NordicNinja, with participation from existing investors (English, Swedish).
• Billhop (Stockholm, b2b payment platform enabling card-based bill payments): €10.5M ($12M) in a funding round led by EQT Ventures, with participation from Element Ventures (English, Swedish).
• Fundler (Stockholm, mobile robo-advisor): SEK60M (€6M, $6.5M) from Svea Bank and existing investors such as JNE Invest (English, Swedish).
• House:ID (Malmö, digital homeowner app): SEK6M (€600K, $650K) from undisclosed investors (Swedish, machine translation).

News from the Swedish tech sector, startups and VCs

• German neobroker Trade Republic plans to open a tech hub in central Stockholm, without even being active on the Swedish market yet. The primary goal, for now, is to find great "senior talent", although a future launch in Sweden isn't being ruled out (Swedish / DI Digital paywall).
• Malmö-based medtech startup Duearity is gearing up for the launch of what it dubs the "smallest and most flexible tinnitus relief device ever" (Swedish, machine translation).
• Stockholm-based Kry is the largest privately owned healthtech startup in Europe. Mimi Billing met CEO and co-founder Johannes Schildt for a brunch, and asked him a personal question (English / Sifted metered paywall, alternative URL).
• Spotify releaseds its fourth-quarter earnings report (English), and CEO Daniel Ek addressed the Neil Young/Joe Rogan controversy (English).
• Spotify podcast competitor Acast now has its own controversy, surrounding the popular Swedish podcast Framgångspodden and coronavirus vaccine misinformation (Swedish, machine translation)
• Other notable Swedish companies that released earnings reports: digital savings and investments platform Nordnet (English, Swedish), subscription service for digital magazines Readly (English / PDF, Swedish) and investment firm Kinnevik (English, Swedish).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Dutch VC firm Connected Capital closes €154M fund to boost European B2B SaaS startups (English).
• In defense of single-digit million startup exits (English).
• Can a startup have two CEOs? Yes, but it's often not ideal, writes Christoph Janz (English).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• Sweden will lift pandemic restrictions on February 9 (English).

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That's it for today.