News October 11, 2022: Steep, FLOX, Hormona, Younium, GWEN, Vinted, Sustainability Valley 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

• Steep (Stockholm, business analytics platform): €1M ($1M) pre-seed round co-led by Alliance Venture and Inventure, with participation from The Nordic Web Ventures, Antler, Spotify alumni network Greens, and a host of angel investors, including Åsa Lidén, Peder Stahle, Carl Pei and angel collective Framtid (English).
• FLOX (Stockholm, developer of drone-based technology for wildlife management): SEK5M (€450K, $440K) grant from winning 2 public procurement pilot projects funded by the Swedish Board of Agriculture (English).
• Wellstreet’s FinTech Fund led a €600K ($580K) funding round raised by Finland-based financial infrastructure firm Enable Banking (English).
• In a follow-on investment, Creandum participated in a $120M Series C raised by Spanish HR management platform Factorial (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

• Bloomberg writes about the "Sustainability Valley" – the "new Silicon Valley emerging at the Arctic Circle" (English / Bloomberg paywall, alternative URL).
• Hormona, Stockholm- and London-based femtech startup providing data-driven solutions for women targeting hormonal imbalances founded by Karolina Löfqvist and Jasmine Tagesson, will be pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco between October 18-20, as 1 out of 200 finalists (English).
• Younium, Stockholm-based SaaS solution for B2B subscription management and billing founded in 2017, is expanding into the US and opening its US headquarter in Philadelphia. Last year, the company raised SEK34M (English, Swedish).
• GWEN is the new name of Insert Coin, Gothenburg-based B2B gamification SaaS platform (English).
• Vinted, online marketplace for buying, selling and exchanging new or secondhand items, which in 2019 became Lithuania's first unicorn, has launched a Swedish site (Swedish, machine translation).
• Swedish climate tech VC firm Pale Blue Dot is hiring an analyst and a head of people (English).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• According to the new State of AI Report 2022 and highlighted by Sifted, funding for AI startups worldwide has dropped to 2020 levels (English).
• Danger signs a startup isn't going to work out (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• The Swedish Internet Foundation (Internetstiftelsen) has published its annual report on how the use of the internet and the digitalisation of society is developing in Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.