News March 11, 2022: Diet Doctor, VIDEM, Jord Innovation, Truecaller, Melon, Beetroot and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, as well as some interesting reads.

Financing rounds

• Diet Doctor (Stockholm, subscription service for diet advice): SEK38M (€3.6M, $3.9M) in a funding round led by Centripetal Capital, with participation from Rackspace's ex-CEO Graham Weston (English, Swedish).
• VIDEM (Gothenburg, rapid and reliable molecular point-of-care diagnostics of infectious diseases): SEK5M (€470K, $520K) from EQT Foundation, E14 Invest, GU Ventures, Vasa Angels and Hans Victor (English, Swedish).
• Jord Innovation (Östersund, developer of compostable biomaterial for candle products): SEK3M (€280K, $310K) from Almi Invest, Miun Holding and angel investors Nicklas Berild Lundblad and Andreas Krohn (Swedish, machine translation).

>> Daily updated, subscriber-exclusive Google sheet with all funding rounds raised by private Swedish startups and scaleups. Request access.

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Truecaller published a response to the investigative report about the company's alleged disregard for user privacy in India, outlining a host of factual errors in the original report (English).
• Volvo Cars plans to establish a tech hub in Stockholm, which will bring together over 700 employees from backgrounds such as software engineering, data science and analytics (English, Swedish).
• Cultpix is a new Stockholm-based streaming service for vintage cult films, founded and bootstrapped by Rickard Gramfors and Patrick von Sychowski. It launched last summer and currently offers subscription-based access to over 500 movies globally, without geoblocking, for $6.66/month (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish entrepreneur Sanne Fouquet founded London-based social curation startup Melon and just raised a SEK1.5M round from business angels Cecilia Bratt, Samarth Sharma and Elisabet Nathhorst (Swedish, machine translation).
• Dutch-French micromobility startup Dott enters the Swedish market by launching in Stockholm (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish IT outsocuring/offshoring company Beetroot has 600 employees in the Ukraine. 400 chose or were forced to stay in the country. The company is doing what it can to support them (Swedish, machine translation).
• €6.46B ($7B) were invested in cleantech companies from the Nordics and Baltics in 2021, of which more than half went to Swedish cleanteach companies (Swedish, machine translation).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• How is the war in Ukraine affecting the country’s tech workers? (English / Sifted paywall, alternative URL).

+++

That's it for today.