Swedish Tech Weekly #253
Welcome to the latest from Sweden's startup & tech sector.
I'm Martin Weigert. Swedish Tech Weekly brings you a selection of some of the news I covered in my PRO newsletters last week. Today's email is being sent to 2328 subscribers.
Mergers & acquisitions
• Marathon Software, Stockholm-based investment firm specialized in niche software companies, acquired 70% of Gothenburg-based B2B fintech company Keeros. It was also announced that Marathon Software raised over SEK110M (€9.6M, $10M) in funding for further investments (English).
Funding news
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• Mimo (Stockholm & London; unified payments platform with pre-approved credit built for SMEs, accountants and bookkeepers): £15.5M (€18M, $19M) in a first funding round led by Northzone, with participation from Fost, Cocoa VC, Upfin, and Seedcamp, alongside angels and operators (English). ➡️ Company first covered in my PRO subscription on July 5, 2023.
• Gilion, formerly ArK Kapital (Stockholm, growth & funding platform for startups): €10M ($11M) in an equity funding round from existing investors including Annika Falkengren, and new investors Oscar Werner (recently appointed CEO at Gilion), Göran and Henrik Garvner, and Andrew Konopelski (English).
• Plant (Stockholm, SaaS solution for the real estate and construction sector to identify and reduce the climate impact): SEK25M (€2.2M, $2.4M) from Latour Future Solutions, Almi Invest Greentech, and Course Corrected (English).
• Capitainer (Stockholm; products for self-sampling of blood from the fingertip): SEK21M (€1.8M, $2M) from existing investors Sciety and Sciety Venture Partners (English).
• Mat4Green (Gothenburg, provider of solutions for Indium tin oxide production and indium recycling): SEK6M (€520K, $570K) in equity funding from new investor Jovitech Invest, and existing investor Chalmers Ventures. Additionally, the startup secured a SEK3M grant from the Swedish Energy Agency (Swedish, machine translation).
• Digital Venue, formerly Visitor Toolbox (Stockholm; SaaS solution for museums to visualize objects, collections, and history): SEK3.5M (€300K, $330K) in pre-seed funding from Marinvest, Grafo AS, Almi Invest, among others (Swedish / Breakit paywall).
• Mycorena (Gothenburg, developer of fungi-based vegan protein): €175K ($190K) grant from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Discovery Programme, for the project "Resource Efficient Food Production System for Space Travel" (English).
• NOQX (Stockholm, SaaS platform for goal setting success): around SEK2M (€170K, $190K) from angel investors including Maria Hedengren, Aref Abedi, and Niklas de Besche (Swedish / Breakit paywall). ➡️ Funding first covered in my PRO subscription on March 18.
• Aire, formerly Energy Director (Jönköping; AI-powered real-time energy optimization solution): undisclosed amount from existing investor Spectria Invest (Swedish, machine translation).
• Drifter World (Gothenburg, automatic AI-driven parking system): undisclosed amount from Knutsson Holdings, which becomes a "significant shareholder" (English).
• Nordstjernan Growth led a $28.5M Series B funding round raised by US-based company Oden Technologies, provider of AI-driven solutions for the manufacturing industry. Other Swedish protagonists in the round are Flat Capital (as new investor), and EQT Ventures (which invested in Oden previously). The company was co-founded by the Swede Willem Sundblad, who also is CEO (English).
• EQT Ventures led a $14M Series A round raised by UK-based tech engine for private equity deals Pactio (English).
• Luminar Ventures participated in a €5M seed funding round raised by Norwegian startup Photoncycle, which is building a "space-effective, autonomous energy system powered by the sun, enabled by innovative technology, affordable for many" (English).
I covered many more rounds, as well as more details, in my PRO newsletters last week.
News from Swedish startups & the tech sector
• Sana launched a free version of its AI assistant for work, for personal use. It's available at sana.ai. The Stockholm-based startup aims to become a global category leader for enterprise and business AI assitants, and to reach more than one billion users, says founder and CEO Joel Hellermark (Swedish / Di Digital).
• Sana also made it as only "real" Swedish protagonist on the Forbes 2024 AI 50 List, which recognizes "the most promising privately-held artificial intelligence companies". There are at least two other companies on the list which partly have ties to Sweden, though: Replicate and Databricks.
• 40 Swedish startups will pitch in the four regional finals of Venture Cup's STARTUP 2024 competition (English).
• BuddyCompany, the Stockholm-based provider of on-demand home service marketplaces and brands, is looking for co-owners/acquirers for its services/brands TaskRunner, Mooova, TechBuddy, and Expertiger.de. Moving forward, BuddyCompany will solely focus on its new SaaS platform BuddyPro (English).
• Brief profile of Nature Station, a Karlstad-based startup developing a modular multisensory health room pod that "brings nature's health effects to humans when humans can't get to nature". Recently, two prototypes were launched with pilot customer Epicenter (English).
• Hiber, browser-based game creation and social gaming platform based in Gothenburg, has unveiled a tool named "SkyScape AI", which "automatically turns any image into an interactive 3D world (English).
• Isabella Löwengrip, entrepreneur and one of Sweden's first major online influencers (before the term even existed), co-founded an AI startup named Aimastar which offers AI-powered solutions for product photo creation and optimization to online retailers (Swedish, machine translation).
• Cling Systems, Stockholm-based developer of intelligent systems for global battery circularity, reports net revenue of SEK10.5M for 2023, up almost 10x YoY (English).
• Plantvation, Sundsvall-based startup offering cultivation technology for the forest industry, won the Almi Pitch 2.0 event at the Åre Business Forum 2024 (Swedish, machine translation).
• ihopa, Stockholm-based platform for sharing products, is scaling down temporarily, to cut its burn rate, but is also looking for an additional co-founder with skills in scaling up a company (Swedish, machine translation).
• Soundtrack Your Brand, the Stockholm-based music licensing service for businesses, launched an AI Playlist Generator (English).
• Erik Wallin, co-founder of Northfork, is stepping down as CEO and transitioning from his executive duties at the Stockholm-based provider of solutions to make recipes shoppable. Sara Larsson will succeed Wallin at the helm (English).
• Mimo, Brite, and Atlar are the three Swedish protagonists on a Business Insider list of "32 most exciting European fintech startups to watch in 2024, according to venture capitalists" (English).
• Della8, Helsingborg-based platform for facilitating and managing collective ownership of larger physical assets, is broadening its scope by also including shared ownership of boats in its offering (Swedish, machine translation).
• Tonight (Monday) at Epicenter in Stockholm, La French Tech Nordics hosts an event titled "How to reach 50% Women In Tech?", featuring three discussion panels (waitlist for last minute spots).
• Nordic APIs, an international community of API practitioners and enthusiasts, will host its Platform Summit 2024 in Stockholm on October 7-9, 2024.
• Funding megarounds made a comeback in Europe in Q1, and eight of those were raised by Swedish startups (English).
• 🎧 Podcast interview with Ingrid Bonde Åkerlind, Stockholm-based VC at Swedish-British firm Oxx, on product-market and go-to-market fit in B2B SaaS (English / 1 hour).
Exclusives for PRO subscribers last week
PRO subscribers last week also read about these things (among many others), which mostly have not been covered or curated elsewhere:
• A data lakehouse platform from southern Sweden launched after 12 months of development.
• Funding raised by a so far largely bootstrapped Swedish equity crowdfunding platform.
• A bootstrapped startup from a small town in Småland announced ambitious expansion plans in the US.
• Bankruptcies of five Swedish tech startups.
• One early-stage Stockholm-based AI startup, which participated in a renowned incubator, shut down.
• A startup which was named one of the "hottest in Stockholm", is rebranding and lost a co-founder to another company.
• 13 new Swedish tech startups.
• Fresh annual figures from various startups.
Join PRO, if you are an early-stage investor, analyst, or a sales exec.
Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyon
• Monterro published the third Nordic B2B software benchmark report, in which nearly 300 software founders and executives provide insights into their challenges, KPIs, priorities and outlook (English).
• Founders must make sure that VC money doesn't make them dumb (English).
• "The moat for AI applications is in the data and the data engineering" (English).
• Building deep tech companies is easier and more affordable than ever before. Still not easy, but getting easier (English).
Other interesting things related to Sweden
• Sweden’s underlying inflation rate fell more than expected in March, fueling expectations for the Riksbank to start cutting interest rates ahead of major peers next month (English).
• On September 1, 2024, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) will make the previously announced switch from Star Alliance to Sky Team (English, Swedish).
• Sweden's government plans to invest SEK385M ($36M) in strengthening the country's bomb shelters, emergency services and civil defence (English).
• Fucus vesiculosus, a type of seaweed found in the Baltic Sea, only reproduces at full moon. Now the plant will be sent to space, to study this more (Swedish, machine translation / the translations to "Stingray" and "bluefish" are incorrect).
• How the central Swedish city of Skövde became a hub for game development (Swedish, machine translation).