Sweden

A competition for the Internet of Things has been launched by three of Northern Europe’s largest  companies: Tetra Pak, Scania and Nobia. The goal is to develop game-changing solutions for everything from kitchens to trucks to packaging, through the creation of a technical prototype with a business focus. Participants in the competition will receive free access to IBM’s development tool …

The Stockholm-based healthy food startup Naturalbox explains their successful crowdsourcing campaign on Prowly. Results: coverage in key media channels, nearly 100 investors, 212% campaign overfunding. In order to raise capital for its operations, Naturalbox chose crowdsourcing over a traditional VC, engaging its customers, friends and fans. To make that happen, the startup decided to leverage all the advantages of social …

In 2013, the two founders behind the podcast app Acast, Måns Ulvestam and Karl Rosander, discovered a resurgence of podcasting happening in Sweden.  When looking into the Swedish ecosystem, they found an amateur landscape where all the important parts were broken or didn’t exist. These parts included metrics, monetisation, and discovery, as well as sharing.  “This is the reason we …

The Nordics have a natural advantage when it comes to education technology, including strong school systems, technical expertise, and forward-thinking municipalities who put digitalization on the agenda. What is holding back ed-tech development in the region? Many startups in the Nordics struggle with the VC investment bottleneck and finding the right talent. However as Hanna Kristín Skaftadóttir of Mimi Creations …

Swedish Innovation Compass is the app helping entrepreneurs, researchers, and innovators to navigate the innovation support system in Sweden. The user is guided to everything relevant from venture capital, business incubators, government grants and more. After going through Lund University’s accelerator program, the app is sitting at over 5 000 downloads and now has a web version too. Recently, they …

The Nordic Startup Awards grand finale took place in the Harpa Center in Reykjavik, Iceland, and hosted collaboration with Icelandic Startups.  Attendees from all over the Nordics gathered to celebrate the best startups, accelerators, and investors of the year. Kim Balle, founder of the Nordic Startup Awards, spoke about why the awards are so important for the startup ecosystem. “We …

Peak, the successful UK-based brain training app, backed in part by Creandum, has launched in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden with localised versions to the native languages of each country. Peak is the app that trains your cognitive function with challenging and fun games, exercising skills such as memory, focus, attention, problem solving, and mental agility. They also offer non-traditional games …

Stockholm-based Identitrade, founded by Phillip Hallenborg in 2014, is on a mission: to unlock the web for trusted consumers. B2C companies need to create best in class user journeys for online domains and devices. Increasingly, they need to do so in the context of commercial partnerships. Today consumers cannot flow freely between domains – they are subject to signups, logins …

On April 23, in packed Münchenbryggeriet in Sweden, Startup Day 2016 through open the doors to the Swedish startup scene.  The event included 10 keynote speakers with a well-maintained gender balance, an Impact Expo offering resources for growing startup,   fintech panel discussion, Nordic Startup Awards, and well done startup pitches. After the hype around the event is gone and …

The semi-finals of the Nordic Startup Awards are now finished. This series of events promotes and celebrates startups in the Nordic region.  Country winners are chosen for each country, and the finalists move upwards to a grand ceremony held in Iceland at the end of May. Winners in Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have been announced in regional ceremonies …

The InnoFrugal Conference acts as a forum for best practices, policy analysis, sharing the latest thinking and highlighting success in frugal innovation. The second annual InnoFrugal event was held last week at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre in Vantaa, a few minutes north of Helsinki. Co-organised by the non-profit Nordic Frugal Innovation Society and the Ministry For Foreign affairs Finland, …

The world-renowned startup and technology event Slush is set to occur for it’s ninth run in Helsinki, Finland on November 30 and December, 2016.  Register now to join the biggest startup conference in the Nordics and one of the most exciting startup events worldwide. “Our focus is on creating an event that brings the highest value to the startups. We …

Sweden. The Unicorn Factory. Top three on the Global innovation index. One of the strongest Gaming Industries in the world.  The potential for an ed-tech hub in the Swedish startup ecosystem is huge. By Jannie Jeppesen, Head of EdTech Sweden Innovative, disruptive and scalable startups like Spotify, Klarna, Mojang and King have come out of Sweden the last years. The …

An intensive 10-week program is going to take place starting in May at Sweden’s prized startup hub SUP46. A startup fund called 500 Nordics is helping to propel and cement Stockholm’s reputation as a leading place for startup growth by teaming up with Sweden’s most active early-stage investor, Almi Invest. “We love to support 500Startups coming to Sweden and see …

Want to help shape the future of green cities and create sustainable solutions to climate challenges on a regional level? Join the Nordic Cities Workshop, held in Malmö, Sweden from the 28-29th of April, 2016. Climate-KIC works to create consistency between private, public, and academic initiatives on climate change. Their goal is to find solutions to environmental challenges through cooperation …

Across the Nordic region, schools are looking to use ed-tech solutions to create a more individualized educational experience for students through adaptive and interactive learning, and help teachers better manage their classrooms.  While ed-tech companies rush to fill this need, it is worth remembering that it takes more than hardware to make adaptive and interactive learning a success. Ed-tech has …

InfoShare 2016 is the biggest tech and new media conference in the entire Central and Eastern European region. For the 10th year in a row, the event will take place in Gdansk, Poland, from 18-20 May at the Amber Expo, the biggest expo center in Tricity. This  event brings in over 5,000 worldwide participants and 100 speakers spanning the entire …

Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces are currently a booming business, thanks to the rise of the internet and high interest in collaborative economy. People are increasingly sharing and swapping what they have to meet their needs through other individuals on online marketplaces. Klue aims to reap the dividends of the sharing economy. Thus, the rise of the multibillion dollar industry with several American …

Fintech startups from all over Europe were nominated for the European Fintech Awards in Holland.  Now, over 20 of them have been named as part of the “European Fintech Top 100“. This means that the top companies have been invited to participate in the European Fintech Awards on April 14th in Amsterdam, where the top 25 on the list will …

In 2014, Airinum CEO and Co-founder, Alexander Hjertström, moved from Sweden to India to attend a semester of school. Within his first few weeks in India, he noticed he was having asthmatic symptoms due to the poor air quality. This led to a growing concern on Alexander’s part, as he knew that this was not just an isolated issue in …