Swedish Tech Weekly #267

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This newsletter was sent on August 5, 2024 to subscribers of Swedish Tech Weekly.


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 recently, and is sent to 2471 subscribers today.

Mergers & acquisitions

• The UK-based PE firm Tenzing is acquiring the majority of shares in Bannerflow, Stockholm-based creative management platform for marketing teams (English).

• SecureAppbox (Stockholm, secure communication platform for businesses and organizations) is being acquired by publicly traded Luleå-based sector peer Compodium, for SEK27.5M (€2.4M, $2.6M) (English).

• CR Group, formerly C-Resiliens (Stockholm, cybersecurity provider) is acquiring the Dutch cyber security company Fox Crypto from its owner Fox-IT, for €70M (English).

Funding news

Do you have unreported funding news you want to see here? Fill out this form or respond to this email.

• GreenIron (Stockholm; technology for reducing the climate footprint of the world’s metal, mining and manufacturing industries): SEK100M (€8.5M, $9.2M) from existing investors including FAM and Almi Invest, for starting the production of fossil-free iron (English, Swedish / Impact Loop paywall).

• Exeger (Stockholm, manufacturer of flexible solar cells made to power gadgets): SEK67M (€6.2M, $5.8M) from the US asset management firm 57 Stars (which invests SEK57M), and the Karlstad-based business man Fredrik Larsson (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Moon Rover Games (Stockholm; game studio dedicated to the creation of cooperative titles set in systemic, emergent worlds): $3.5M in a seed funding round from Korean game developer NCSOFT (English).

• Melt&Marble (Gothenburg, producer of designer fats via precision fermentation): €2.5M ($2.7M) grant from EIC Accelerator, as well as an additional €260K grant from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (English).

• Pinpoint Estimates (Stockholm, crowdsourcing platform for financial and market performance estimations): SEK10M (€860K, $930K) from undisclosed investors, for the continued Nordic expansion (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Creandum led a $13.5M funding round raised by US-based startup Rillet, which is building a modern accounting platform "that makes zero day close a reality" (English).

• For PRO subscribers: Many additional rounds, as well as more details, valuations, and numbers for many covered rounds (English).

• For PRO subscribers: Google Sheet with funding data, 1000+ rounds added during the past 12 months, updated daily (English).

News from Swedish startups & the tech sector

• Cheque is the name of a fintech startup to be founded by Julia Delin and Andreas Johansson, currently the CEOs of the Stockholm School of Economics' VC fund SSE Ventures and incubator/accelerator SSE Business Lab respectively. Cheque aims to solve the challenge of liquidity for SMEs by digitalizing early payment discounts on B2B invoices. The two will leave their roles at SSE by the end of the year (English, Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• BrainLit, Lund-based developer of biocentric lighting environment solutions, is successfully expanding in the US, where the company focuses on sports performance as a promising first key market segment. Brainlit says it has clients in several major sports leagues, including the NBA, NFL, MLB, and MLS (English).

• Proxify, Stockholm-based platform connecting developers with growing companies founded in 2018, reported net revenue of SEK407M (€35.3M, $38.5M) for 2023, up 77%, while loss was -SEK28.7M, compared to a small profit in 2022. ➡️ First covered in my PRO subscription last week.

• Anyfin, Stockholm-based consumer loan refinancing provider founded in 2016, grew net revenue by 44% to SEK224M in 2023, while reducing loss to -SEK201M (Swedish / Di Digital paywall).

• Brief profile of Accord, a KTH Innovation pre-incubator alumni startup from Stockholm that'll soon launch an organization app for simplifying the sharing of tasks and responsibilities within groups (Swedish, machine translation).

• Hyber, subscription-based rental platform for children clothes and products headquartered in Stockholm, is entering a corporate reconstruction (Swedish, machine translation).

• Freetrade, the UK-based stock trading and investing app, is to pull out of the Swedish market, to focus solely on the UK (English).

• Cogo, Denmark-based shared mobility aggregator founded by Swedish co-founder Robin Blichfeldt, reportedly filed for bankruptcy, and was subsequently acquired by the Belgian technology company Mayten (English).

• 🎧 A year ago, Camilla Bergman launched Impact Loop, the Swedish news site and newsletter covering impact tech. In this podcast interview, she talks about the challenges and successes of the past twelve months (Swedish / 48 minutes).

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond


• Private equity firms bought up VC-backed European tech companies worth a combined $2.3B in Q2 2024, the highest quarter by deal value since Q2 2022. However, deal count was the lowest since late 2020 (English).

• Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units (English).

• Using the term "AI" in product descriptions reduces customers' purchase intentions, according to a US study (English).

• Climate tech startups need to factor in geopolitics (English).

• Different shades of PLG: free-trial or freemium? (English).

• For most SaaS startups, budget comes from stealing it from an older incumbent. This got inverted in 2020-2021, but now it reverted back (English).