News October 5, 2022: Spotify, Oterlu AI, FLOAT, CemVision, reCRQL, Norrsken, Urb-it and more

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

Mergers & acquisitions

2 news today involving content moderation companies:

• Spotify (Stockholm, audio streaming service) acquires Ireland-based content moderation tech company Kinzen. Deal terms were not disclosed (English).
• Oterlu AI's 4-person team, including the co-founders, was "acqui-hired" by Reddit. Financials were not disclosed, and no announcement has been made about what this means for the Gothenburg-based machine learning-powered content moderation startup. However, a near-term shutdown is very likely. According to Crunchbase, Oterlu AI had raised around $670K from among others Icebreaker.vc and Chalmers Ventures (English, Swedish).

Funding news

• FLOAT (Stockholm, provider of dilution-free capital for Nordic SaaS and other subscription businesses): SEK1B (€92M, $92M) debt facility from undisclosed backers (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• CemVision (Nybro, developer of the world’s first carbon neutral cement): undisclosed – but reportedly large – amount from Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy. The funding comes as part of Breakthrough Energy's Fellows program, which admitted CemVision's co-founders Claes Kollberg and Paul Sandberg to its second cohort (English, Swedish).

>> 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

• reCRQL is a new Gothenburg-based circular retail platform founded by Sofie Hjelmberg and her mother Ann Hjelmberg (which I added to my subscriber-exclusive "new tech startup tracker" already in early September). The SaaS solution aims to power brands and retailers' resale channel as well as to help "circulents" sell and buy sustainably (Swedish, machine translation).
• Next year, the Norrsken Foundation is opening a hub in Barcelona. It will be three times the size of the Stockholm hub and home 800 entrepreneurs (English, Swedish).
• The share price of publicly listed Stockholm-based sustainable logistics platform Urb-it collapsed by almost 90% today after the company announced that the recently raised SEK23.3M (€2.2M, $2.1M) and the cash flow from operations wouldn't be enough to sustain the business beyond Q4 2022, and a major owner received a margin call (Swedish, machine translation).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Dutch VC Newion launches a new fund with an initial closing of €130M to back up to 20 business software startups across the Benelux and DACH regions and the Nordics (English).
• How much should a B2B software startup spend on marketing? Some suggestions from CMOs and B2B SaaS VCs (English).
• A (so far US-centric) Airtable list of funds that consistently lead pre-seed rounds (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Sweden hasn't come very far regarding the establishment of facilities for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology (Swedish, machine translation).
• A new ranking of the world's 100 best bars includes 2 contenders from Sweden, both located in Stockholm: Lucy’s Flower Shop (#49) and Röda Huset (#78) (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.