News June 23, 2022: Mentimeter, Meds, Einride, Kavall, Tilly, GPT-SW3 and more

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

Funding news

• Mentimeter (Stockholm, audience engagement platform): SEK432M (€40M, $42M) from Creades, Nordstjernan Growth and existing investor Alfvén & Didrikson, although an unspecific part of the invested amount represents secondary transactions in which existing shareholders sold some shares. The funding round values the company, which since it founding in 2014 only raised $625K, at SEK2.5B (€230M, $250M) post-money (English, Swedish).
• Meds (Stockholm, online pharmacy): SEK80M (€7.5M, $8M) from existing investors (without specification which ones) at a post-money valuation of SEK1.26B (€118M, $124M) - slightly lower than the SEK1.5B at which the company was valued in 2021 (Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).

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News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Gothenburg-based Einride has received approval to operate its driverless Autonomous Electric Transport (AET) trucks on public roads in the US - a first in the country, according to the company (English, Swedish).
• Kavall, Stockholm-based hyper-local rapid grocery delivery service, announces cost-cutting measures and smaller-scale layoffs, one week after news about a new funding round. The company is also evaluating whether it should stay on the Finnish market (Swedish, machine translation).
• Stockholm-based personalised fertility support app Tilly wants to help people reduce (in)fertility stress and time to pregnancy. In this interview, co-founder Anna Sane talks about her own painful and long path to giving birth, which eventually led to her founding Tilly (English / Indepentend soft paywall, alternative URL).
• Spotify is developing ‘Community,’ a new place to see your friends’ activity in the mobile app (English).
• AI Sweden together with partners is building "GPT-SW3", the first truly large-scale generative language model for the Swedish language. It's being trained on Berzelius, the only available computer in Sweden that is sufficiently large for this purpose (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• UK-based payments firm SumUp, a competitor of Sweden's Zettle, adds €590M to the war chest (English).
• The era of rising interest rates and tighening money supply marks the end of "indifferent VCs" -  speculators who see each startup as part of a portfolio of lottery tickets (English).
• How to get into angel investing as an operator (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Tesla is opening Sweden's to date largest Supercharger station at the E6 in the south of the country. It's the EV marker's 63rd Supercharger station in Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).
• The Polestar 2 now supports Apple CarPlay, thanks to a recent over-the-air software update (English).
• The restaurant operator Brasseriegruppen is losing the license to serve alcohol at its 10 partly well-known restaurants in Stockholm (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.