News January 31, 2023: Syntach, X Shore, Quiqly, petgood, Katalysen Ventures, 9 AI predictions for 2023 and more

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

Funding news

• Syntach (Lund, developer of a medical device for the treatment of patients with chronic left ventricular heart failure): up to €15M ($16M) in equity financing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) (English).

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News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• X Shore, Stockholm-based maker of all-electric boats, is laying off 10 percent of the workforce to "achieve profitability faster" (Swedish, machine translation). The company's LinkedIn page currently lists 112 employees.
• 4 months ago, high profile Swedish pay-as-you-go content service Sesamy launched its system for letting publishers sell articles on an one-off basis. But Sesamy isn't the only protagonist in this field: Växjö-based Quiqly went live around the same time with its own competing service. One of the first customers is Realtid.se (Swedish, machine translation). According to data from Bolagsverket, the founders Marcus Öhrner and Carl Johansson have not raised any outside funding.
• petgood, Stockholm-based startup producing and selling insect-based pet food, launched on the German market (Swedish, machine translation).
• Katalysen Ventures, publicly listed Stockholm-based venture developer, raised SEK11.9M (€1.1M, $1.1M) through a directed share issue from strategic investors such as the Alex Schütz family office, and Klemens Hallman (English).
• J12 Ventures partner and co-founder Emmet King penned down the firm's 9 AI predictions for 2023 (English).
• 🎧 Podcast interview with Joel Hellermark, CEO & Founder of Stockholm-based personalized learning platform Sana, on building the global leader in learning (English, 37 minutes). I'm getting quite some Daniel Ek vibes when listening to him.

Swedish tech earnings

• Spotify published its interim report för Q4 2022, posting a smaller loss than anticipated, and better than expected subscriber growth. The company is the first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers (English, Swedish).
• Nordnet (Stockholm, digital savings and investments platform) published its year-end report 2022 (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• A new European VC collective comprising 120 venture firms, including Northzone and Balderton, has revealed the VC Impact Playbook (PDF) — a guidebook for European investors unfamiliar with impact-led returns (English).
• Why can't founders just ask for money in pitch emails? (English)

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Stockholm, alongside Helsinki and Hamburg, were chosen for a EU project to identify, test and evaluate the use of drone-based services in urban environments (Swedish, machine translation).
• Astrid, Maja and Alma were the top 3 names given to newborn girls in Sweden in 2022. William, Liam and Noah were most popular for newborn boys (Swedish, no machine translation available).
• A man reported himself to the police after having printed around 50 functioning 3D guns and sold them to criminals (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.