Hey all,
great news - Finland was ranked the happiest country in the world for the 7th time in a row. Beats us how that’s possible, but we’re still delighted to hear the news.
As always, happy to hear from you, let us know what we missed, what we can improve on & what you’d like to read about!
All the best,
Funding rounds
🇫🇮 Infinited Fiber secures €27M to make textile circularity a reality
🇪🇪 Tuum raises €25M for its API-based core banking platform
🇸🇪 Voi secures $25M to boost micromobility fleet expansion across Europe
🇸🇪 CandelaBoat raises €24.5M for its “flying” boats
🇸🇪/🇳🇴 Tibber raises €22M in venture funding + loans for its renewable energy equipment
🇸🇪 Ingrid raises €21M for its delivery experience platform
🇪🇪 BotGuard secures €12M to expand global cybersecurity reach
🇫🇮 Steady Energy secures €10M to transform energy sector with innovative nuclear solutions
🇸🇪 CemVision raises €10M to turn industrial waste into green cement
🇫🇮 Sooma nets €5M to expand access to at-home depression treatment
🇸🇪 Blixt raises €5M for software-controlled electricity technology
🇪🇪 GScan raises €3M for advancing cosmic ray muon tomography
🇱🇻 Mapon secures €3M to expand its fleet management solutions
🇸🇪 Younium raises €2.7M to expand global presence in subscription management
🇸🇪 Legitify secures €1.5M to redefine online notarization
🇸🇪/🇪🇪 Crypto Rogue Games secures €1.38M to forge the future of web3 gaming
🇪🇪 Themo raises €1.3M for smart thermostat solutions
🇫🇮 Perfat Technologies raises €1M for its novel healthy fat solutions
🇫🇮 Teamspective receives €900K to enhance employee engagement solutions
🇪🇪 Beholder raises €862K to revolutionize detection of minteral formations
🇪🇪 Crespect secures €700K for its work management software for law firms
🇸🇪 Tab raises €210K to eliminate the need for physical receipts
🇱🇹 Broswarm secures €100k for its drone-based mine detection solutions
Did we miss something - send us a note!
Quick Notes
Index Ventures launched a guide for founders to scale their teams called Scaling Through Chaos - read it here.
Norssken, Planet A & Speedinvest launched a playbook on building and scaling climate hardware - find it here.
Invest Lithuania came out with a deep dive on the latest developments in the country's fintech ecosystem - read it here.
FiBAN published their angel investment data for 2023 - check it out here.
Denmark is soon to become home to one the world’s most advanced AI supercomputers.
Opinion
To celebrate our happiness victory, we decided to highlight a report that was published last week in Finland aka the Maria 01 impact report. Maria 01 has been publishing a report yearly for some time now & we’re both happy members of the Maria 01 community. Read the whole report here.
There’s a lot of interesting data in the report, but here are a couple highlights. Below is a graph where all the Maria 01 companies have been tracked by industry. E-commerce & online marketplaces are surprisingly high on the list as well as health & wellness, but the other top 4 categories bring no surprises.
Maria 01 startups (as well as many others) saw a dip in funding raised last year, but it was still quite close to the 2021 numbers. Obviously it’s always better to look at the FVCA data, since there is some selection bias here, but we still thought that this is an interesting datapoint :D
Have a happy week y’all!
Thank you for reading Nordic Notes, your biweekly guide to the Nordic startup ecosystem. If you enjoyed this issue, please like it and share it with your friends.
Beholder's connection with Estonia seems to be more on legal side (HQ there) and not on team and business. Ukrainian team. US-focus if I'm not mistaken. However, great proof that HQ in Estonia is oh so digitally convenient.
Great summary thanks for sharing. For the first time for a few years I read the https://worldhappiness.report/ its well worth the effort. Really good to unpack what goes into defining and quantifying happiness.