News March 26, 2024: Happy at Work, Netigate, Everdrone, DREV, Parlametric, Interlinked, World Football Player, ShimmerCat, DIRI Safety Solutions, Kivra, Imbox, Emsense, and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• Happy at Work (Gothenburg, employee engagement platform, founded 2018) is being acquired by the Finland-headquartered HR company Webropol. The price was not disclosed. Happy at Work was founded by Marcus Nordquist and Jens Östgaard, has raised around SEK8.5M in funding, and was most recently valued at SEK18.8M (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).
• Netigate (Stockholm, SaaS feedback solution for brands, founded 2005) acquires the Finland-based, Icebreaker.vc-backed startup Lumoa, which describes itself as "the first customer experience platform to offer generative AI". Financial terms were not disclosed (English). In August 2022, Nordic PE firm Gro Capital bought a majority stake in Netigate.

Funding news

⬜️ publicly traded

• Everdrone (Gothenburg, developer of drone technology for emergency response, founded 2017): SEK11M (€1M, $1.1M) from the company's major shareholders, serial entrepreneur Maciej Drejak (who also is Everdrone's head of software), and GLA Invest (Swedish / Breakit paywall). This brings total equity funding to around SEK35M, based on data registered with Bolagsverket and sourced via Eivora. For 2022, Everdrone reported net revenue of SEK2.8M, and a loss of -SEK13.4M.
• DREV (Gothenburg, developer of sustainable battery cleaning technology, founded 2023): €700K ($760K) in a pre-seed funding round led by Unconventional Ventures, with participation from undisclosed angel investors. The funds will be used to "accelerate the product development", and to "support the pilot project" at "one of the world's largest gigafactories" (English). Until now, DREV funded its development through grants announced last year.
• Parlametric (Lund, business intelligence and market research provider, founded 2017): SEK4M (€360K, $390K) in an oversubscribed funding round from existing investor I Love Lund, and other undisclosed investors (Swedish, machine translation). In late spring last year, Parlametric announced its previous round, which amounted to SEK10M, at a pre-money valuation of SEK65M. For 2022, the company reported net revenue of SEK7.2M, a doubling from 2021, and a loss of -SEK11.2M.
• Arevo announced the Industrifonden-led SEK75M funding round which I covered on February 20 in the "unannounced funding" section (English). In conjunction with this, Impact Loop talked to Arevo CEO Niklas Åström (Swedish, machine translation).
• In a follow-on investment, Pale Blue Dot participated in a $14M Series A round raised by Ember, a Scottish company building an all-electric intercity bus network in the UK (English).

Unannounced funding