News November 3, 2022: Froda, Femton, Bowter, Nhost, Grafana Labs, Klarna, Einride, Inventure and more

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

Funding news

• Froda (Stockholm, digital loan provider for small businesses): SEK84M (€7.7M, $7.5M) from new and existing investors, among them Karl-Johan Persson, Victor Jacobsson, Nicklas Storåkers, Einar Mattsson and Martin Dahlin, at a post-money valuation of SEK1.2B. The new funds will be used for the expansion outside of the Nordic markets (Swedish / DI Digital paywall, Swedish #2, no machine translation available).

>> 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

• Femton is a new, initially free service launched by Stockholm-based social video platform Meetball, intended to be used for "speed & blind business networking". According to the company's CEO and founder Christoffer Åhman, Femton was built on the same technical platform as Meetball, and targets people in Sweden who enjoy business networking (exclusive).
• Bowter, Arvika-based rental platform for electric boats, annnounced the launch of an e-boat subscription, starting at 995kr/month (Swedish, machine translation).
• Nhost, Stockholm-based open source Firebase alternative with GraphQL, launched its V2.0 on Product Hunt (English).
• Grafana Labs, Stockholm & New York-based developer of open source software for visualizing operational data, announced a new open source project for frontend application observability, Grafana Faro (English).
• Klarna is launching a new feature that allows users to pay with the Klarna app (via scanning a QR code), in partnering stores. The option is initially being made available in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany (Swedish, machine translation).
• Einride is reportedly in the process of finalizing the first close of a Series C funding round at around $100M from VCs including existing investors EQT Ventures, Norrsken och Nordic Ninja. A 2nd close that could bring in another $100M – that one even open to participation from smaller investors – is also being pondered (Swedish / Breakit paywall, Swedish #2, machine translation).
• Nordic VC firm Inventure closed its 4th fund, of €150M ($150M), to back early-stage startups in the Baltics and Nordics. With ticket sizes ranging from €200K to €5M, the fund also allows for angel-sized investments, for the first time. In the past years, Sweden has become Inventure's most important market and represents around 1/3 of all investments (English, Swedish).

Swedish tech earnings reports

• Storytel (Stockholm, audiobook and ebook subscription service): English.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Stripe cuts 14% of its workforce, CEO says they "overhired for the world we’re in" (English).
• "Today, founders just have to assume the next round isn’t coming. At least until they are 90%+ sure they’ve got a real VC that wants to lead the next round" (English).
• Learnings from China's social media giants on how to build a winning paid membership program (English).
• Startup lessons from founders of product led growth companies (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• October saw Sweden’s plugin electric vehicle share reach 59.4% of the auto market, up from 50.1% year on year. The Volvo XC40 climbed to take the 1st spot, from 2nd last month (English).
• Brief interview with Astrid Linder, professor of traffic safety, who is leading the project to create the prototype for the first crash test dummy modeled after the average woman's body (English).

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That's it for today.