Swedish Tech Weekly #270

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This newsletter was sent on August 26, 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 last week, and is sent to 2515 subscribers today.

Mergers & acquisitions


• The bankruptcy estate of Mycorena, Gothenburg-based developer of fungi-based vegan protein, was acquired by the Belgian plant-based food company Naplasol (English).

• Klarna acquired the assets of Laybuy, a BNPL service from New Zealand, which ceased operations in June. It will now be relaunched under the Klarna brand (English).

• The Swedish Husqvarna Group, manufacturer of outdoor power products, is acquiring the Brazilian startup InCeres, which operates a platform for soil analysis that facilitates decision-making and improves productivity for farmers (English).

• EQT is buying a stake in Australia-based school management platform Compass Education (English).

Funding news

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

• Grafana Labs (New York & Stockholm, developer of open source software for visualizing operational data): $270M in a Series D extension, consisting of both equity funding, as well as a secondary transaction. The round was led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners (English).

• evroc (Stockholm, building a hyperscale sustainable cloud to return data sovereignty to Europe): €42M ($47M) in a Series A funding round from existing investors EQT Ventures and Norrsken VC, with participation from new investor Blisce (English).

• Auctionet (Stockholm, marketplace for valued objects): SEK50M (€4.4M, $4.9M) from Alfvén & Didrikson, for the UK expansion. The investor also acquires existing shares for SEK25M (English).

• Fieldly (Malmö, project management tool for construction): SEK18M (€1.6M, $1.7M) from the entrepreneur Christer Dahlén, who is Fieldly's majority shareholder (Swedish / Rapidus paywall). ➡️ First covered in my PRO subscription on August 2.

• Virtual Days (Stockholm; virtual event platform for recruitment, onboarding, and employer branding,): SEK10M (€870K, $970K) co-led by VEQ and Quinary Investment, for the international expansion (English).

• DealPotential (Gävle; investment intelligence platform featuring private investment, company, and market data): $1M in a seed funding round from an undisclosed "prominent family office" (English).

• Fundrella (Stockholm, effective fund selection and reporting platform): SEK5M (€440K, $490K) from Gorilla Capital, RadCap, Nyfikna Investerare, and VNTRS (English).

• Advicy, formerly Netblocks (Stockholm, AI-powered platform helping property owners manage their buildings in a sustainable way): SEK4M (€350K, $390K) from angel investor and real estate broker Fredrik Eklund, raised in the show Draknästet, for the international expansion (Swedish, machine translation).

• Foodchain by Blockchain (Lidköping, traceability solution provider for the food sector): SEK3.9M (€340K, $380K) from existing private investors (Swedish / Impact Loop paywall).

• NOMS (Borås, creator of infrastructure for on-demand textile production): SEK2.5M (€220K, $240K) from IGS Capital in an ongoing round, for the completion of the startups' platform (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• 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

• Simulair, Stockholm-based startup founded in 2022 by KTH students Maja Åstrand and Simon Lilja, has unveiled its machine for fighting bed bugs (English).

• Waylog, a two-year-old Stockholm-based startup offering a supply chain finance solution, grew its net revenue in 2023 by 25x to SEK25.1M, while achieving a positive EBIT result of SEK8.5M. ➡️ First covered in my PRO subscription on August 23.

• Venture Mafia, created by the Berlin-based Swedish VC Johan Torssell, maps the alumni networks of iconic startups. He told me he plans to add Swedish startup mafias as well. You can vote for additions here.

• Profile of Nornor (also stylized as nor²), an Örebro-based offering a next generation compute platform for running function as a service and container based workloads (Swedish, machine translation).

• Brief profile of Careifai, a Luleå-based startup working on an AI-powered solution to shorten the queues for an ADHD diagnosis (Swedish, machine translation).

• Einride, the Stockholm-based provider of digital, electric and autonomous shipping technology, is in need of fresh funding, following large losses (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• Eways, a Stockholm-based provider of EV charging solutions, has applied for a corporate reconstruction process (Swedish, machine translation).

• The Stockholm-based venture studio Levels is facing an uncertain future, as several subsidiaries have been declared bankrupt (Swedish / Breakit paywall).

• FLOX Robotics, Stockholm-based provider of autonomous wildlife management as a service, unveiled its autonomous geese herding system (English).

• BizLab Analytics, a Stockholm-based startup, launched its software BizLab FLOW, an application that uses AI technology in digital screens to provide customers with information about flows of people, and allows for adapting messages to the viewer "based on age and gender" (Swedish, machine translation).

• Stockholm-based startup AlgoDX received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its sepsis detection software (English).

• Neko Health, Daniel Ek's and Hjalmar Nilsonne's preventative health care startup, is opening a second, bigger location in Stockholm (English).

• Insurely, Swedish open insurance platform, is launching a product that enables banks and other financial institutions to gain real-time access to data on their customers' investments (English).

• Swedish electric boat startup Candela has signed a deal to sell eight of its vessels — half of all its orders so far — to the Saudi Arabian government's futuristic city project Neom (English).

• Mindler, Stockholm-based digital service for talking with psychologists, is adding couples therapy to its suit of services (Swedish).

• Stockholm-based edtech startup Readioo is developing an AI-powered edtech platform and device that aims to transform kids books into interactive adventures. Now Swedish entrepreneur Linda Wennerström is joining as co-founder and COO. She previously co-founded and led the SaaS startup Momang.

• The applications are open for the next version of the Swedish AI Startup Landscape (English).

• Fredrik Löfgren, Swedish entrepreneur, researcher, and AI expert, has died following an accident with a bus in Stockholm (Swedish, machine translation).

• Northvolt is shutting its California R&D unit and moves the work to Sweden (English).

• Swedish meal kit pioneer Middagsfrid, which was established in 2007 and the first on the market in Sweden, is being closed down by its owner Axfood (English).

• Nordnet, publicly traded Stockholm-based digital savings and investments platform founded in 1996, crossed the milestone of two million customers across the Nordics (English).

• 📺 The new season of Draknästet (Sweden's version of Dragon's Den) has started (Swedish).

PRO subscribers last week also read about

• A stealth AI climate tech startup raised first funding from "some of Sweden's top angel investors" – and from another Swedish tech startup.

• Reducing traditional animal testing is the mission of a Swedish startup which just raised yet-to-be-announced pre-seed funding.

• A new Swedish-Lithuanian defense tech startup (incorporated in Sweden) is building something with hardware and AI.

•  Liquidiation of a Swedish metaverse startup which raised pre-seed funding from top VCs

•  Upcoming seed round of a biotech looking to fix a deficiency that a large number of people suffer from.

• 2023 revenue numbers and results from various selected Swedish tech startups.

• And much more!

Join PRO here. Ideal for startup investors and analysts.

Other interesting things from the startup/VC world & beyond

•  For European startups, it's a good time to raise pre-seed or seed funding (English).

•  Startups that automate sales with AI are booming, but VCs are wary (English).

•  The Financial Times writes software engineering is becoming "the first 'killer app' for generative artificial intelligence" (English).

•  Generative AI may cause the total spend on individual processes or tasks to shrink, but the technology likely will capture more of what was once service-related spend, driving growth in the software market (English).

• Daniel Ek and Mark Zuckerberg wrote a joint op-ed in The Economist (also published on their companies' websites) arguing for why Europe should embrace open-source AI (English).

• Sweden's central bank cuts its benchmark rate to 3.5% from 3.75%, and says it could consider as many as three more reductions this year (English).

• A survey on the preferences and attitudes of Generation Alpha (i.e. children born from 2010 onwards) in Sweden (Swedish, machine translation).

• The publicly traded Swedish craft Whiskey producer Mackmyra is bankrupt (English, Swedish).

•  Sweden and Denmark will together put pressure on digital platforms to stop the recruitment of young people by criminal gangs (English, Swedish).

• Sweden is one of 11 EU countries in which alcohol consumption per person increased between 2010 and 2020 – though only slightly (English).