News January 18, 2023: Caspeco, Leeroy, Typelane, Anyfin, Dryft, Quickbutik, Women in Tech Conference, Modular Finance and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Nordic B2B software growth investor Monterro acquires a majority stake in Caspeco, an Uppsala-based SaaS provider of software systems for the restaurant, hospitality and experience industry founded in 2006. The deal values Caspeco at SEK330M (€30M, $32M), according to Di Digital (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall). Meanwhile, Caspeco acquired some assets of its bankrupt Sundsvall-based industry peer Leeroy (Swedish, machine translation).
• Typelane (Stockholm, employee onboarding and offboarding platform founded in 2016) was acquired by Stockholm-based onboarding and offboarding HR services firm Whippy for an undisclosed amount. Typeline had raised around $1.1M, including a $800K seed round in October 2019 from, among others, Icebreaker.vc and Almi Invest (English).

Funding news

• Anyfin (Stockholm, consumer loan refinancing provider): €30M ($32M) in a Series C funding round led by existing investor Northzone, with participation from new investor Citi Ventures as well as other existing investors such as EQT Ventures, Accel, Fintech Collective, Augmentum FinTech and Quadrille Capital. This round brings Anyfin's total equity funding to $131M. Anyfin co-founder and CEO Mikael Hussain tells Di Digital that the valuation "is not lower than for the previous round" which the company raised in 2021 (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall).
• Dryft (Stockholm, tech enabled full-service provider for home improvement, maintenance and energy efficiency work): SEK20M (€1.8M, $1.9M) in a bridge round from existing investors and a few undisclosed new angel investors (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Scania Growth Capital led a €10M ($11M) funding round raised by German SaaS for road management Vialytics (English).
• Volvo Group Venture Capital made a strategic investment in Canada-based autonomous trucking startup Waabi. The amount was not disclosed (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

• Helsingborg-based Quickbutik is integrating generative AI into its service, boldly claiming to be "the first e-commerce platform in the world to offer AI fully accessible to all e-commerce merchants". Merchants are now able to automatically produce product texts, category descriptions, blog posts and SEO-adapted texts "with the click of a button directly in the platform". The company promises more AI features to come during 2023 (English, Swedish).
• Sting announced having received "significant financing" from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) to support and accelerate 100 Swedish climate tech startups within the next 4 years (Swedish, machine translation).
• This year's Women in Tech Conference will take place on March 23 in Stockholm (English).
• US-based web performance & security giant Cloudflare is looking for a Head of Nordics Region (English).

Swedish tech earnings

• Modular Finance (Stockholm, SaaS fintech solutions for banks, institutions and Nordic listed companies) shared some financials with Di Digital. Revenue in 2022 grew almost 44% to SEK101M (€10M, $10.7M), and operating profit was SEK62.5M – representing an operating margin of around 62% . The founders Petter Hedborg and Måns Flodberg still own around 70% of the 9-year old company and state that they don't plan to do an exit or raise any funding. For 2023 they eye an expansion into the UK (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Riku Seppälä, the founder of and General Partner at Icebreaker.vc, started a Substack. His first post: 12 steps to build a B2B company from 0 to seed (English).
• "As a VC you, now more than ever, need some degree of focus [...] If you cannot articulate the handful of spaces you are trying to dominate (from an investment returns perspective), you are probably not going to succeed ongoing" (English).

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That's it for today.