Exciting Scandinavian startups — a selection of 3

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 270

News 1. Northvolt lithium-ion battery and billions of fundings

Northvolt is a developer and manufacturer of sustainable lithium-ion batteries from Stockholm. Sustainable because batteries are being recycled, announced that up to 50% of a new battery will be made from recycled batteries. Main usecases for Northvolt’s batteries are in electric vehicles and energy storage. Siemens and Volkswagen are among the investors, who gave Northvolt $6bn funding (latest $2.8bn in June 2021). Opinion: The age of electric mobility is around and (sustainable) batteries are in high demand for this revolution. Northvolt will be an interesting company to keep an eye on in this space in the upcoming years.

An ecosystem is forming around electric vehicles, more manufacturers, beyond just electric cars.

News 2. Abzu is a new class of artificial intelligence

Abzu is a deeptech startup born from the desire to challenge the fundamental assumptions of contemporary, black box artificial intelligence. Founded in 2018, Abzu has raised $9.5m for its pioneering machine learning technology, which is inspired by quantum mechanics and neural networks, resulting in a transparent and trustworthy AI. Opinion: Abzu has great potential, their AI algorithm doesn’t only find and show the final solution but the difference is that it will also give an explanation on how and why it came up with this specific solution. That helps researchers understand the algorithm’s decisions and find possible errors.

Abzu inspires data scientists to be more scientific.

News 3. Neat hardware to help return to the office & classroom

Neat designs meeting room devices for Microsoft Teams and Zoom that make the meeting space “covid-friendly” e.g. by monitoring air quality and counting people during meetings. Neat devices do not need to be connected to a Laptop or PC, they have their own iPad-like controller and powerful chip to process audio and video. Opinion: Covid-19 has changed a lot of things over the past year, many companies and schools all across the globe have been staying connected remotely. Meanwhile Neat and Zoom have been working together to help organisations create safe environments while building effective meeting experiences.

Virtual coffees and working from home are here to stay with Neat :p

Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.

Come back next Monday and share your opinion.