News November 9, 2022: Alight, Simsen Diagnostics, EQT Ventures, Intergiro, Preglife Connect, Spotify and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

• The Investment company DIF Capital bought a majority stake in Alight, Stockholm-based solar-as-a-service provider to the commercial sector founded in 2013. The agreement includes an investment of €150M ($150M) and a secondary buy-out of a number of existing shareholders (English, Swedish).

Funding news

• Simsen Diagnostics and eDNA solutions (Gothenburg-based biotech startups): SEK3.6M (€330K, $330K) grant from FORMAS to develop tools to monitor biodiversity (Swedish, machine translation).

>> 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

• EQT Ventures has closed its third fund and filled its coffers with €1.1B ($1.1B), for investments of between $1M and $50M in Europe and the US. The fund was raised and closed relatively quickly, between February and June of this year (with final paperwork coming in since then), and there have been some 13 investments made out of it so far (English).
• Intergiro, Stockholm-based provider of financial infrastructure for innovators and change-makers founded in 2014, was voted "hottest fintech startup" at this year's The Europas Tech Startup Awards (English).
• Preglife, Stockholm-based startup offering a pregnancy tracker for pregnant women and new parents, has launched a second app: Preglife Connect, a social network for pregnancy and parenthood (English).
• Spotify reportedly laid off a small number of its recruiting staff, according to Breakit (Swedish, machine translation).
• Stockholm-based crypto exchange Quickbit is launching its consumer offering in the Netherlands (English). Meanwhile, Swedish competitor Safello announced the milestone of 300,000 customers in Sweden (English).
• The Nordic State of AI 2022 is a newly published report by the Helsinki-headquartered AI lab Silo AI (English / requires registration).

Swedish tech earnings reports

• Awardit (publ) (Stockholm, SaaS provider of loyalty programs): English.
• Quickbit (publ) (Stockholm, crypto exchange): English.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Meta confirms 11,000 layoffs, amounting to 13% of its workforce (English).
• US-based publicly-listed Klarna rival Affirm is reducing its outlook for the financial year 2023 (English).
• VC firms are turning to venture partners to compete for the best deals (English).
• Burnout in failed entrepreneurs vs burnout in “fairly successful” entrepreneurs (English).

End note

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That's it for today.