News November 17, 2022: Dema.ai, NitroCapt, Helios Innovations, Juni, Multiply, Sigrid Therapeutics, Grafbase and more

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

Funding news

• Dema.ai (Stockholm, marketing analytics tool for online retailers): SEK40M (€3.7M, $3.8M) in a pre-seed round led by J12 Ventures, with participation from Framtid and other angel investors. One of the founders is Babyshop co-founder and former CEO Marcus Tagesson (English, Swedish).
• NitroCapt (Uppsala, fossil-free nitrogen fertilizers) and Helios Innovations (Lund, technique that utilizes low temperature waste heat to evaporate industrial liquids) are the winners of the Startup 4 Climate competition. They recieve a cash prize of SEK1M (€92K, $95K) each (Swedish, machine translation).
• Luminar Ventures led a $2.3M seed round raised by Norwegian autonomous drone delivery startup Aviant (English).
• Newly founded Swedish VC firm Behold Ventures led a $750K pre-seed round raised by Iceland-based e-sports coaching software platform Esports Coaching Academy (ECA) (English).

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

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Juni, the well-funded Gothenburg-based financial platform for e-commerce, is laying off around one third of its workforce of total 217 employees, in preparation for tougher economic times (English, Swedish).
• Stockholm-based startup Multiply came out of its stealth mode, promising an "AI-first workspace that helps teams get rid of repetitive work". The company was founded 2019 by Swedish serial entrepreneurs Rasmus Adler Wahlberg, Martin Källström and Henrik Eneroth (English).
• Profile of Sana Alajmovic and her Stockholm-based startup Sigrid Therapeutics, where she is working with a team of 11 PhD holders on the goal of stopping Type 2 diabetes before it starts (English).
• Grafbase, Stockholm-based instant serverless GraphQL backend platform, is the first Swedish startup to join the new "Workers Launchpad" funding program created by content delivery network provider Cloudflare. The cohort brings together 25 startups and several dozen VC firms – none from the Nordics yet, it seems (English).

Swedish tech earnings

• Bricknode (Skövde, B2B focused SaaS cloud banking software) published its Q3 2022 interim report (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• European VC firm Index Ventures is launching its second seed fund, of $300M (English).
• PwC published its third annual State of Climate Tech report. Climate tech investment in the 12 months to Q3 2022 represented more than a quarter of every venture dollar invested globally (English).
• A founder guide to dilution through the different funding stages (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Sweden could finally scrap its historic ban on spontaneous dancing (English).
• Government inquiry calls for state-run e-identification system (English).
• The home-knitted garment is Sweden's Christmas gift of the year 2022, according to retail research organisation HUI (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.