Don't be fooled by Klarna's candy-pink branding, buzzy slogans and glitzy advertising. The fintech recently secured a $10.65bn valuation and is eyeing a public listing in the next couple of years.

Klarna offers “buy now pay later” loans at selected retailers, giving consumers instant credit at checkout, which they then pay back over in installments. It now operates across most of Europe, as well as Australia and the US.

Founded in 2005 in Sweden, the company makes most of its money from retailers, who give Klarna a chunk of the transaction price each time. Consumer late fees and interest make up an undisclosed part of its revenue, but the company was profitable for 10 years up until 2019.

Nonetheless, Klarna has come under fire in recent years for failing to flag the dangers of debt to consumers, with pressure groups lobbying for clearer advertising standards.

Read more: Pablo Escobar’s brother is suing Klarna for millions

Is Klarna worth $11bn?

When green energy startup Northvolt raised $1bn in 2019, it came as quite a surprise.

Based in northern Sweden and founded by a former Tesla employee, Northvolt is building a lithium-ion battery cell factory to supply the world's growing fleet of electric cars — and, perhaps, other forms of transport too.

It hit the headlines again in 2020, when Spotify founder Daniel Ek announced that he was participating in a new $600m funding round into Northvolt; the first investment from his €1bn 'moonshot' fund.

Read more: This Swedish startup just raised $1bn to build a battery farm to rival Tesla’s “gigafactory”

Spotify founder backs gigafactory as first deeptech investment

Norwegian online grocery startup Oda (formerly called Kolonial) has just raised €223m from SoftBank and Prosus (formerly Naspers) at a €750m post-money valuation. That’s one of the biggest funding rounds ever for a Norwegian startup — but it’s not the only thing it has to boast about.

In 2020, Oda grew 100% and hit close to €200m in revenue. It now accounts for 70% of all online grocery orders in Norway — and so far this year, it’s turning a profit.

But on top of that, cofounder and CEO Karl Munthe-Kaas reckons Oda has also developed the world’s most operationally efficient warehouse system. It now has a UPH (average units processed per labour hour) of more than 212, which is streaks ahead of the competition. (Even the UK’s Ocado, considered a leader in grocery technology, had a UPH of 168 in 2019.)

Read more: Online grocer Kolonial raises €223m from SoftBank and Prosus to take on Europe — and rebrands as Oda.

Tink is one of Europe’s most interesting fintechs — having rolled out giants like MasterCard and Paypal who have expressed an interest in acquiring the Swedish fintech.

But they’re not budging just yet. “This is far too much fun to be acquired,” Tink cofounder Fredrik Hedberg told Sifted.

The fintech started off as a consumer app in 2012, helping customers keep track of their personal finances, but later pivoted to providing banks and other fintech players with its aggregation software. Now it’s one of Europe’s largest open-banking companies, boasting the highest number of regional clients, and is now valued at €680m after an €85m round in December 2020 which included PayPal and Opera Tech Ventures.

In October 2020, it also partnered with French fintech Lydia to help improve its open banking features.

Nuff said — we’re on the edge of our seats.

Kahoot! is a Norwegian startup with a platform that allows users to create, share and play educational games.

So, for example, a teacher can make a simple quiz about rivers South America for a geography class. What’s startling about the company is not the technology, but the numbers: Kahoot! has around 1.5bn players a year.

The startup has seen strong growth particularly in the last couple of years thanks to rapid user expansion in the US, which appeared to have prompted companies such as Disney, Microsoft, Northzone, and Creandum to invest. In October 2020, Softbank made a $215m investment which is likely to fuel more growth and aquisitions.

One question is how the two main business lines will develop, which is games for students and games for business users, and also how sales of its “premium” paid offerings will develop (particularly for businesses, where margins are potentially much higher).

Wolt nicely abolished Delivery Hero and Takeaway.com’s duopolies on the food delivery market in Europe, when it announced a €7.5m investment from Delivery Hero cofounder Lukasz Gadowski in October 2020. Don’t be fooled by the low number. In January 2021, it raised a whopping $530m in a round led by ICONIQ Growth.

The company now has operations in 23 countries and 129 cities, focused on the Nordics and Eastern Europe; and it recently branched out into groceries, pharmacies, pet stores, florists, home decor and utility retailers.

“Companies like us give brick-and-mortar retailers a way to compete with Amazon,” CEO Kuusi told Sifted. “Our preferred model is to work with partners,” he said four months later. “Partners can provide as good an experience and efficiency as dark stores.” Wolt now has 1,500 retail partners, big and small, including Spar in Poland, Carrefour in Georgia and ICA in Sweden.

Kuusi is also toying with the idea of licensing Wolt’s technology as another way to grow the company.

Keep an eye on Wolt — it’s preparing for an IPO too, taking ample advice from existing investors 83North, Highland Europe, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, EQT Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners; and new ones too — ICONIQ Growth, Tiger Global, DST, KKR, Prosus, EQT Growth and Coatue.

Sifted members can read more here.

In the rapidly-growing market for digital health, Kry is one of the leaders. The company, which facilitates video calls to doctors or psychologists, has seen rapid growth since launch in 2015 and even more so during the coronavirus pandemic.

The idea is that the service saves everyone time: users put in their symptoms and then organise a call rather than going to the GP every time there is a problem. The company has already completed more than 1.6m patient meetings.

The big question for the company, which operates in Sweden, Norway and Germany under its own name and in the United Kingdom and France under the name Livi, is whether or not it can really nail its European expansion.

It already has tough competition in this new space from the likes of Babylon Health (UK), Push Doctor (UK), Min Doktor (Sweden) and ViviDoctor (Belgium). There are also ongoing challenges of companies such as Kry working to disrupt such a sensitive and heavily-regulated sector such as healthcare. Many incumbent players are rapidly developing their own telehealth technologies. How much room will be left for Kry?

Further reading: The ‘femtech’ doctor on demand will see you now Why telemedicine startups might not be such a smart investment after all Europe’s doctor apps, compared

Wine lovers will know Vivino — the startup considered ‘Netflix for wine’ that has seen a huge 1.5bn wine labels scanned by 50m users. It allows users to identify, rate and review wines.

In February 2021, the company announced a $155m raise led by Swedish investment firm Kinnevik. It intends to expand in its key markets — Germany, Italy, the UK, Portugal and the US, where it is now headquartered in San Francisco.

Vivino has seen huge growth in the past year — with a 103% increase, year over year, in wine sales between 2019 and 2020. Online sales currently account for 3% of the $380bn global wine industry, but Vivino is confident the proportion will continue to grow.

The Finnish space startup is expected to have a stellar 2021 with the acquisition of eight new spacecraft. It’s unique in its SAR microsatellites imaging capabilities, launching the first in 2018, but has failed to garner interest from European governments — instead focusing on North and South American governments for whom its collected imagery after natural and anthropogenic disasters, like oil spills.

A spin off from Aalto University, Newspace Capital, Seraphim Capital, Draper Associates and Space Angels are amongst its key investors. In September 2020, for instance, it raised €74m in its Series C — welcoming new investors like the Luxembourg Future Fund, NewSpace Capital and the European Investment Fund.

Read more: Iceye raises €74m to lead in communication from space

Lunar (formerly Lunar Way) is going all out to show millennials they can have a productive relationship with their bank.

Its app offers the target group bank accounts, credit cards and smaller loans, alongside stock trading and mortgages — and hopes to be the next Monzo. In 2020 the fintech announced it’s interested in the buy now pay later market too — so it’s got Klarna in its sights. Indeed, it seems Lunar isn’t afraid of a moonshot.

By starting up in the Nordics, it’s benefited from focused but consistently strong growth, attracting tens of thousands of committed customers every month — with a total user base of over 200k across Sweden, Denmark and Norway. A launch in Finland is expected to come in the coming months.

It’s received consistent funding from Seed Capital Denmark, Nykredit Realkredit, Greyhound Capital and Socii Capital — amongst others — raising €40m in its October 2020 Series C, which brought its total funds to €108m.

But can it match the hot competition elsewhere?

The last-mile logistics startup, founded in 2015, claims to be growing 300% year-on-year. So what makes it different? Instead of delivering direct to doorstep, it delivers to smart lockers — citing sustainability as one of the core reasons.

“The shipping industry consists of ancient postal companies using fossil fuels and fossil tech,” Priftis says. Parcels are delivered by diesel or petrol-filled vans, which often stack up more miles on the road than necessary due to inefficient routing systems. On February 14 last year, the startup switched all its Swedish logistics to fossil-free fuels.

In February 2021, it raised €75m in a Series B round led by EQT Ventures — at the time telling Sifted it’s “on track to enter two substantial European markets”.

While the VR hype seems to have died down since 2018, CEO Timo Toikkanen told Sifted there is a strong interest in business applications. Some of Varjo’s biggest clients are in the automotive sector, with carmakers using the headsets to allow designers to completely redesign the interiors of the car virtually before going to the expense of actually doing it. Medical research and astronaut training are two other use cases.

It seems to be a valid hypothesis. In August 2020, it announced a €46m raise in a Series C round just 18 months after the launch of its first virtual and mixed reality headset — bringing its total funding to €84m. The round included Atomico, Lifeline Ventures, EQT Ventures, Tesi, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Swisscanto Invest and Nordic Ninja VC.

Budbee’s one of the startups leading Europe’s last-mile delivery and ecommerce boom. And indeed, 2020 was a great year for the company. In June, the company reported having reached revenues of €15m for the first half of 2020, the equivalent of the annual revenues of 2019. In December, the startup increased its revenue by 200%.

Budbee’s positioning itself as the sustainable option, and told Sifted it aims to to carry out 100% of its deliveries fossil-free — already the case for its operations in Sweden. It’s available in Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands too.

Budbee, founded in 2015 by Fredrik Hamilton, has early on managed to attract investors such as CO:LAB, the investment leg of H&M, and Kinnevik, a large Swedish investor that invested €10m in the company as late as spring 2019.

In January 2021, Budbee raised €52m in a new funding round led by one of the leading pension plan companies in Sweden, AMF, bringing its total funding to €76.1m.