News October 26, 2022: Sana Labs, Bonanza Location, Juni, Spotify, Norrsken and more

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

No acquisition or funding news today.

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Sana Labs is leveraging the recent advances in generative AI. The Stockholm-based personalized learning platform recently launched "Assistant", a tool that "can generate course questions, explanations, images, and even entire courses" by combining one's learning content with knowledge from the internet. The newest Assistant feature is the ability to generate unique illustrations from scratch, "trained on every image on the web" (English).
• Bonanza Location is a soon-to-be launched platform for offering and renting filming locations. The founders Sofie Izard Höyer and Sara Guldbrandsson say their Gothenburg-based startup resembles "Airbnb for the movie & and advertising sector" (Swedish, machine translation).
• Juni, the financial platform for e-commerce, has secured its Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. The company says this is "a first step to enable Juni to issue e-money in Sweden and in time, across Europe" (English).
• Spotify says Apple is making it harder to sell audiobooks, calling Apples practices “anticompetitive” and saying it was “choking competition” (English).
• Babyshop, Stockholm-based online retailer of kids clothing which raised a large amount of venture capital, has applied for reconstruction after failing to secure follow-on investment (Swedish, machine translation).
• Funda Sezgi and Sara Kappelmark will become Co-CEOs of the Norrsken Foundation. They are going to replace current CEO Erik Engellau-Nilsson who in July announced his intention to hand over the reign. Both will earn a monthly salary of SEK125,000 (€11,500, $11,500), which is the same salary as their predecessor had (English, Swedish / Di Digital paywall, Swedish #2).

Swedish tech earnings reports

• Spotify hit 456 million monthly active users (+23M) and 195 million paying subscribers (+13%) at the end the most recent quarter. The company posted a quarterly operating loss of €228M ($228M). Growth in advertising revenue is slowing (English). Here's the shareholder deck (English / PDF)

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Potential competition for Sweden's edtech companies Magma Math and Albert: Duolingo is launching its free math app to the public (English).
• Last year, no VC bet more on crypto than Andreessen Horowitz. The timing was not good: The firm’s flagship crypto fund shed around 40% of its value in the first half of 2022 (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Online grocery sales have fallen by 20% over the past twelve months (English).
• Swedes are eating significantly fewer sausages than a year ago, according to an annual representative survey (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.