News January 24, 2023: SeaTwirl, Hailey HR, AI Medical Technology, Volta Trucks, Tendium, Disruptive Ventures, Fort Knox and more

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

Funding news

• SeaTwirl (publicly listed) (Gothenburg, floating wind power technology): SEK64.5M (€5.8M, $6.3M) through an oversubscribed rights issue (English, Swedish).
• Hailey HR (Stockholm, SaaS HR solution): SEK30M (€2.7M, $2.9M) from existing investors, among them 41an Invest, Martin Randel, Alexis Priftis, Daniel Pilotti, Johan Skarborg and Jeremias Andersson. The fresh funds will be used for the expansion into several European markets (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• AI Medical Technology (Stockholm, AI-powered diagnostic support tool for skin cancers): SEK10.8M (€1M, $1.1M) from Northern CapSek Ventures and other undisclosed investors (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

• Stockholm-based Volta Trucks announced it has locked in customer orders for over 300 of its all-electric Volta Zero trucks. By securing these orders, the startup expects to see revenue totaling over €85M ($92M). Scaled production is slotted to begin in a couple months (English).
• Tendium, Stockholm-based AI-based bidding and proposal management platform to help companies sell to the public sector, writes that its technology was trained on 4 million procurement documents. The startup – which was founded in 2018 – states it uses the model to help companies extract the key terms from procurement documents, and plans to facilitate better written tenders via generative AI. This would lead to healthier competition and lower thresholds to participate (Swedish, machine translation).
• The Umeå-based investment firms Disruptive Ventures and Fort Knox plan to invest SEK100M (€9M, $9.8M) during 3 years in startups from the north of Sweden. Ticket sizes typically range between SEK500K and SEK5M, but can even go as high as SEK10M. 4 previous investments will be moved into the new partnership: Safe trafikskola, Coeo, Strativ and Service Noce (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• HR tech company Deel, now valued at $12B, nears $300M of annual revenue (English).
• TikTok may be the greatest startup growth engine of all time. But being able to leverage TikTok to drive growth for a product instead of paid user acquisition is not indicative of a strong business or product market fit (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Sweden will upgrade its Berzelius supercomputer using Nvidia's latest AI systems to aid in understanding various diseases such as cancer and make it among the world’s fastest AI supercomputers (English).
• Sweden’s National Library is training state-of-the-art AI models on a half-millennium of Swedish text to support humanities research in history, linguistics, media studies and more (English).
• In 10 years, Sweden could be 25,000 game developers short, according to a new industry report (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.