News May 9, 2022: PocketLaw, Bencha, Sisterly Tribe, AI Sweden, Develop Diverse, Xpeng and more

Here is today's curation of news from Sweden's startup and tech sector, exclusively for subscribers of Swedish Tech News.

Funding news

• PocketLaw (Stockholm, contract automation SaaS legal tech platform): €10M ($10.5M) in a Series A funding round led Atomico, with participation from a couple of founders and operators such as Hanno Renner, Jonas Rieke, Christian Reber, Jeppe Rindom, Gloria Baeuerlein and Allison Pickens. Also previous investors partipicated, among them Cristina Stenbeck and Susanna Campbell (English, Swedish).
• Bencha (Stockholm, comparison platform for sustainable fashion): SEK8.5M (€800K, $850K) from Caroline Hansson, Louise Lundin and Ulf Barkman. The round wasn't communicated until now, but took place in fall 2021. Currently, Bencha founder Amanda Thorén is raising again (Swedish, machine translation).
• Sisterly Tribe (Gothenburg, D2C sustainable yogawear brand for women): SEK4.5M (€430K, $450K) from Wellstreet and Alexander Hars (English, Swedish).

>> 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

• AI Sweden, the Swedish national center for applied AI, launched My AI, a networking platform for Sweden's AI community and industry (Swedish, machine translation).
• The privately run electronic ID system BankID is used by 90 % of all Swedes over the age of 12. The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority proposes to put it under state supervision, or alternatively, to create a state-operated equivalent (Swedish, machine translation).
• Denmark-based startup Develop Diverse launched its software for biased-free recruitment writing in Swedish (Swedish, machine translation).
• Chinese EV maker Xpeng is considering the Northern Swedish city of Skellefteå as testing site for its upcoming electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle X2 (Swedish).
• DI Digital will bring its Female Founders event series and startup pitch to Malmö on September 29 2022 (Swedish, machine translation).
• Dutch/German VC firm Endeit Capital has opened a Stockholm office and just announced the final closing of its third fund, at €303M ($320M) to support European tech scaleups. (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Cherry Ventures published fundraising guidance for founders, adressing the current market dynamics (English).
• TechCrunch notices an "alarming amount of layoffs across the startup ecosystem" (English).
• Internal rate of return (IRR) is a vanity metric for VC fund performance (English).

Other interesting things from Sweden

• IKEA plans to spend €3B ($3.2M) on stores, much of it to modify its outlets so they can double up as e-commerce distribution centres (English / Reuters paywall, alternative URL).
• Curt Bergfors, the founder of Swedish burger chain and major McDonald's competitor Max, has died at the age of 73 (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.