News September 8, 2022: Kobalt Music, Flowplayer, Cascade Drives, Bits Technology, Brizo 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

• Kobalt Music, the London-based tech-centric music label founded 22 years ago by the Swede Willard Ahdritz, sold a majority stake to the private equity company Francisco Partners. The deal is reportedly worth $750M. Founder Willard Ahdritz will move back to Stockholm at least part time and scale up his work with the Norrsken Foundation (English, Swedish).
• Flowplayer (Stockholm, full stack video platform founded in 2007) was acquired by US-based live and video on demand platform Wowza. Financial terms were not disclosed (English). In 2019, it was reported that Flowplayer was bought by the Finnish company Thirdpresense. However, this deal eventually fell through, confirmed Flowplayer CEO Henrik Lovén when I contacted him about it.

Funding news

• Cascade Drives (Stockholm, next generation of electro-mechanical linear drives for mobile and industrial applications): SEK50M (€4.7M, $4.7M) in a funding round led by Industrifonden (Swedish, machine translation).
• Bits Technology (Stockholm, solution for automating all layers of open finance): €1M ($1M) in a seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Alliance Venture, Forward VC and Greens Ventures, as well as unspecified angel investors from fintechs and SaaS companies in the Nordics and beyond, such as Klarna, iZettle, Pleo, and Moss (English, Swedish).
• Brizo (Stockholm, third-party logistics provider that enables brands to offer sustainable same-day delivery while keeping control of their brand and data): undisclosed amount from Antler, Noel Abdayem, David Frykman and Shahrooz Latifzadeh. The company was started by Vembla co-founder Dino Todorovic (Swedish, machine translation).

>> Daily updated, subscriber-exclusive Google sheet with all funding rounds raised by private Swedish startups and scaleups. Request access.

News from Swedish startups, the tech sector and VCs

• As Stockholm-based (former) anti-food waste startup Karma is pivoting its business towards becoming an order and payment solution for restaurants, Denmarks (former) Karma rival Too Good To Go is partnering with Sweden's ubiqitious coffeehouse chain Espresso House to sell unsold food at discounted prices (Swedish, no machine translation available)
• Sophia Bendz, partner at Cherry Ventures, is the sole protagonist from Sweden represented on Insider's and Tribe Capital's first "Seed 50" list for Europe, which highlights the region's top early-stage VCs and angels (English / Insider paywall, alternative URL).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

• Guide to raising a Series A as a product-led growth (PLG) company (English).
• Hacker News comment thread on the question: Is it okay to just bootstrap it, even when VCs are knocking? (English).

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That's it for today.