News September 29, 2022: EQT, Doccla, Detectify, Ripe, Bapelsin, Bencha, Corite, SSE Business Lab fund 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

• Swedish private equity firm EQT is acquiring the US-based company Billtrust, which is developing a platform to automate the invoice-to-cash process, for $1.7B in an all-cash deal (English).

Funding news

• Doccla (Stockholm & London, operator of a virtual hospital ward with focus on the UK market): $17M in a Series A funding round led by General Catalyst, with participation from funds managed by KHP Ventures and existing investors Giant Ventures and Speedinvest (English).
• Detectify (Stockholm, automated external attack surface management solution): $10M in follow-on funding led by existing investor Insight Partners (English).
• Ripe, formerly Chimer (Stockholm, product-led sales platform): $2M in a funding round led by Earlybird and Alliance Venture, with participation from angel investors Sara Brooks, Christian Finstad, Johannes Schildt, Fredrik Nylander, Per Emanuelsson and Mina Zarbafi. This looks to be the first investment of Germany-based VC firm Earlybird in Sweden (English).
• A group of Swedish angel investors surrounding Gabriel Ghavami led a $700K pre-seed funding round raised by Indian sports discovery platform Spolto, which was founded by Swedish entrepreneur Safa Soltani (English).
• J12 Ventures led a $2M seed round raised by Portuguese site reliability engineering platform Rely.io (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

• Bapelsin is a new bootstrapped startup based in Stockholm, founded by Evelin & Stephanie Kaup as well as Magnus Poromaa. The company just launched a mobile app that lets gig workers operate like a company and sell and manage services from their smartphone with only a few clicks (Swedish, machine translation)
• Bencha, Stockholm-based comparison platform for sustainable fashion founded in 2020, has filed for bankruptcy as it failed to secure follow-on financing (Swedish, machine translation).
• Corite, Stockholm-based platform for crowdinvesting in music artists, is launching a native crypto token, $CO. It will be used by upcoming features to "enhance the experience of both artists and fans" (English).
• Breakit published the employee count for 248 Swedish tech companies comprising the years 2020 and 2021, and how the numbers changed (Swedish / Breakit paywall, direct URL to the chart / no paywall).
• Meds, Stockholm-based online pharmacy, is giving up on its plan for an imminent direct listing due to the unfavorable market climate (Swedish, machine translation).
• SSE Business Lab, the incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics, has raised a fund of SEK40M (€3.7M, $3.5M) with an evergreen structure and a final target of SEK100M, to be invested in 20 companies that join the incubate program. Bonnier Ventures is the main investor in the fund which is led by Julia Delin (English, Swedish).
• A newly published report on the Nordic insurtech sector, stating that 60% of all Nordic insurtechs are registered in Sweden (English / PDF).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• SoftBank has started laying off employees at its loss-making Vision Fund and is expected to cut at least 30% of its staff (English).
• How a startup reduced annual server costs by 80% — from $1M to $200k — by moving away from AWS, instead building in-house infrastructure to handle traffic and cached data (English).
• "If you’re going to build something from scratch, this might be as good a time as you’ve had in a decade", says Silicon Valley VC Bill Gurley of Benchmark in this interview on the market reset and what it means for startups (English).

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That's it for today.