News September 20, 2022: Sceneri, Coachendo, Sircular, Spotify, Parakey, Sting 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

• Sceneri (Stockholm and Bardstown, USA, mobile-first platform for no-code game and AR creation): $1.5M in a seed round from SNÖ Ventures (English).
• Coachendo (Malmö, career coaching solution that democratises coaching making it accessible to all employees and individuals): SEK7M (€650K, $650K) in a funding round led by Icebreaker.vc, with participation from angel investor Tracy Wilk (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Sircular (Stockholm, collaborative startup ecosystem platform bringing value to accelerators, investors and startups): SEK2.3M (€210K, $210K) from angel investors such as Noel Abdayem and Svante Tegnér. The company is currently in the process to close an additional SEK5M round (Swedish, machine translation).

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News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• Spotify has officially added audiobooks to its streaming service, but only for users in the US for now, and only as standalone purchases. At launch, the company says its library will contain over 300,000 titles (English).
• Parakey, Gothenburg-based provider of digital key solutions, has launched what it calls "the world's smallest access control system", intended to "enable a faster transition from physical keys and tags to mobile as a key to unlock doors" (English, Swedish).
• Pär Hedberg, founder of Sting, plans to step down as CEO. The Stockholm-based startup incubator/accelerator is now looking for a successor (Swedish, machine translation).
• Apple will increase prices of apps and in-app purchases (excluding auto-renewable subscriptions) on the App Store in Sweden and various other countries on October 5 (English, Swedish).
• Spotify's video postcast feature was used by some to post full pirated movies (English).

Swedish tech earnings reports

• Zound (Stockholm, designs and develops speakers and headphones under different brands): English.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• German VC DTCP (Digital Transformation Capital Partners) raises $300M to back web3, AI and fintech startups in Europe, US and more (English).
• European deeptech startups have raised €12.3B ($12.3B) in 2022 to date, compared to €12.2B raised in the same period of 2021, according to Dealroom (English).
• The Figma acquisition put a spotlight on the huge market potential of next generation creative tools (English).

Other interesting things related to Sweden

• Sweden's central bank increases the policy interest by 1 percent point, to 1.75%, the biggest rise in 30 years (English, Swedish).
• Electricity consumption in Sweden has decreased by 5.7% during the first 8 months of 2022, compared to the same period of 2021 (Swedish, machine translation).

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That's it for today.