News March 3, 2022: Acast, VOI, Spotify, Nothing, Tradera, Crowdcube and more
Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, as well as some interesting reads.
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Subscribe to Swedish Tech News to get access to a daily newsletter that brings you a brief overview of news from the Swedish startup & tech sector, curated by Martin Weigert.
Or, if you prefer a free weekly newsletter, subscribe to Swedish Tech Weekly!
News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs
- Acast's consumer podcast app hasn't received a lot of love lately, and now the Stockholm-based company announced that it will shut down the app in 2022. Acast's focus will be entirely on the open podcast ecoystem, which it monetizes through an ad marketplace and a recently launched subscription offering (English).
- VOI has reportedly picked banks to arrange a planned initial public offering either in the second half of 2022, or next year, targeting to achieve a market capitalization of well above $1B in the IPO (English).
- Spotify has decided to close its recently opened Russia office, but is not disabling access to its service within Russia (English).
- Nothing, the London-based hardware startup founded by Swedish entrepreneur Carl Pei, is reportedly working on a smartphone expected to be announced next month (English).
- Swedish online market place Tradera is jumping on the NFT hype, starts to run digital art auctions (Swedish, machine translation).
- UK-based equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube is launching in Sweden, enabled through new EU regulations. Companies can raise external capital of up to €13M from individuals (English, Swedish).
Swedish tech earnings reports
- Zound Industries (Stockholm, audio electronics company and maker of Marshall, adidas and Urbanears speakers and headphones brands): English.
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond
- Nearly half of all startups with less than $10M of annual revenue that went public last year through a SPAC, have failed or are expected to fail to meet the 2021 revenue or earnings targets they provided to investors (English / WSJ paywall, alternative URL).
Other interesting things from Sweden
- IKEA and H&M are temporarily pausing operations in Russia and Belarus because of the invasion of Ukraine (English).
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That's it for today.
