News July 24, 2022: Epidemic Sound, Sesamy, Qick, Sana Labs, Northvolt, Truecaller, Nordnet and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector.

I didn't send out a newsletter on Friday because I simply didn't have enough significant news. But thanks to Dragos Novac's weekly Sunday CET newsletter, I stumbled about 2 news which I had missed. So here is a special Sunday issue of Swedish Tech News instead, because I want you to start into the coming week well informed!

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Epidemic Sound, Stockholm-based music licensing provider for creators, is suing Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, demanding at least $142M in damages for alleged copyright infringement (English).
• The Acast founders Måns Ulvestam and Karl Rosander see a middle ground between full subscriptions and micropayments. According to this profile of their 1 year old pay-as-you-go content service Sesamy (which currently focuses on audiobooks and e-books), they eventually also plan to launch a "smart paywall" software for publishers which will assess a visitor’s propensity to pay either just for an article or to push towards a subscription (English).
• Bootstrapped Örebro-based e-scooter provider Qick has launched in Stockholm (source: my own eyes 😄). The company which until now focused on smaller Swedish cities, is 1 of the 8 providers which secured the necessary permit (Swedish, machine translation).
• Sana Labs, Stockholm-based personalized learning platform, increased its ARR by 500% during the past 12 months. The user number is growing by 25% every month. The company is planning to open offices in London and New York to better support the already important UK and US markets (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish battery maker Northvolt is looking to make batteries that use carbon contained in wood sourced from Nordic forests to help lower environmental footprint and cost (English).

Swedish tech earnings reports

• Truecaller (Stockholm, global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication): English, Swedish.
• Nordnet (Stockholm, digital savings and investments platform): English.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world

• A look at the H1 2022 investor appetite in Europe, based on the number of "dealers" (i.e. active investors) and their appetite (how many transactions they did) (English).
• Consolidation in the European finance solutions space for SMEs and freelancers: France-based Qonto is buying German competitor Penta. Terms were not disclosed (English).
• Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) wrote about its new operating model: The firm "is moving to the cloud", working primarily virtually, "but can materialize physically on command" (English).

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That's it for today.