Sifted - Northvolt files for bankruptcy

Good morning there,

European climate tech poster child Northvolt is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US after failing to agree a last minute rescue package with investors. The company will now go through a reconstruction process, during which it said operations will continue as normal. More details below.

Elsewhere, some Slush attendees might be waking up to this newsletter in a different bed than the one they expected to be in, after a handful of flights from Helsinki airport to Stockholm, London, Munich and Zurich were cancelled due to snow and wind.

Wish me better luck as I attempt to head home today — and read on for my take on Slush 2024.

Also today:

• ‘Flying ferry’ startup Candela raises $14m extension and enters US market
• Europe’s newest unicorn
• Software from scratch — the startups racing to automate app building with AI

— Amy Lewin, editor

How to find (and attract) top talent
In the fast-paced world of startups, slow hiring can hold back your growth. Learn how to hire faster — and smarter — at our free, virtual Sifted Talks on December 12.

🔋 Swedish battery giant Northvolt is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US after months trying to secure fresh capital from investors. The company will now go through a restructuring process which it expects to be completed during the first quarter of 2025, according to a press release it sent out yesterday evening. It will also aim to raise fresh capital from strategic and financial investors.

• The Chapter 11 restructuring process will allow Northvolt to access $145m in cash; it’ll also receive $100m in financing from the vehicle manufacturer Scania, which is one of its customers.
• The company’s subsidiaries Northvolt Germany and Northvolt North America are financed separately and will continue to operate as usual outside of the restructuring process.
• Tom Johnstone, the company’s interim chair, said in a statement: “This decisive step will allow Northvolt to continue its mission to establish a homegrown, European industrial base for battery production.”
• The news comes after a tough year for the company during which it has struggled to scale up battery production and saw one of its shareholders, car maker BMW, pull a multi billion euro contract.
• The company also laid off 1,600 people across its Swedish offices in September.

🏨 Lighthouse, which provides independent hotels, large hotel groups and B&B owners with booking management software, including AI-driven pricing, alongside a business intelligence platform, has raised a $370m Series C round led by KKR. The raise mints the UK-HQ’d startup as a unicorn. 

• Existing investors Spectrum Equity, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures and Highgate Technology Ventures also participated in the round. 
• The fresh capital will be spent on acquisitions, global expansion and product development, the company said in a statement. It takes the startup’s total funding to $470m.

🚤 Swedish ‘flying’ boat startup Candela has raised a $14m extension to its Series C, bringing its total to $40m for the round. Swedish Bank SEB’s private equity arm led the funding round with participation from EQT Ventures and KanDela AB. 

• The startup has recently started shuttling commuters in Stockholm between a dock in the suburb of Tappström to the Swedish capital’s City Hall and is announcing the first order of one of its 30-passenger vessels to a US customer. 

🏦 HSBC Innovation Banking UK has appointed Citi’s head of business development Emily Turner as its new CEO, subject to regulatory approvals. She’ll take up the role from February 2025.

🤝 Users of Qiskit — a leading quantum software development kit provided by IBM — will now be able to access French quantum computing startup Pasqal’s quantum processors when building quantum computing applications. 

• It’s the first outcome of a collaboration between the two companies announced in June, which aimed to come up with ways to build software for ‘quantum-centric supercomputing’ compatible with different types of quantum computers.
• Until now, researchers and developers using Qiskit could only use IBM hardware. The announcement signals an industry change towards more integration and interoperability. 

🧳 Brazilian neobank Nubank is weighing up moving its legal base to the UK, according to a Bloomberg report. The fintech is working with the UK government on the plans, which were discussed as part of a wider set of agreements between Brazil and the UK, according to people familiar with the talks cited by Bloomberg.

• Nubank, which has more than 100m customers, is one of the most successful neobanks globally. Last year, it made $1bn in profit and $8bn in revenue two years after it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. While its corporate HQ would remain in Brazil, moving its legal domicile to the UK would be a big boon to the European country’s tech industry — especially at a time when talk of it losing its tech crown is heightened. 

🎓 Forty-nine universities in the UK have agreed to adopt new guidelines for spinning out companies put forward in an independent review last year.

• One of the review's aims was to encourage institutions to take less equity in the businesses they were spinning out — a key sticking point for investors in these types of companies.
• The guidelines suggest universities take no more than 10% equity in software businesses and between 10-25% in life science companies.

👩‍💻 Software from scratch? Software engineers are still one of the biggest costs of running any tech business, but more startups are popping up promising they can develop ideas into working products with just a few lines of natural language.

• Tim Smith met some of the founders using AI to automate what’s projected to soon be a $1tn+ market.

🇪🇸 Spanish energy retailer Holaluz came into 2024 on slippy financial ground and in urgent need of funds. This month, the company announced €22m in financing — which took just over half a year to close — and told Sifted it will be cash flow positive in Q1 next year. “We've been fighting like hell to keep the business alive,” CEO and cofounder Carlota Pi told Freya Pratty.

💪 How to manage care responsibilities as a founder — James Townsend, cofounder and CEO of Mobilise, an online service offering support for unpaid carers, shares his tips.

So that's why they call it Slush

If you weren’t one of the 13k attendees at the 16th edition of Slush, the startup event which draws the best-known founders and investors to Helsinki each winter, you missed the usual god-awful weather outside, dark-as-a-club lighting inside and endless side events around the main agenda. 

Hot topics onstage? AI (obviously), Donald Trump and EU Inc. Hot topics backstage: which European LLMs will die first or be bought by a US tech giant? Why is all the food at the venue (as one journalist put it, ‘almost inedibly’) vegan? And who’s going to General Catalyst’s winter ball at a castle?

Most investors I asked had spent a good chunk of their Slush in meetings with founders — although I heard plenty of groans about last-minute requests for catch-ups, and requests from founders who didn’t match a fund’s thesis (readers, do your research!). The matchmaking app did have its moment though; there was a fund leaderboard showing which investors had responded to the most messages on the app. Winner: Hoxton Ventures, with 432 ‘meeting actions taken’ and a 91% response rate. 

Some investors passed on the price of a ticket and instead holed up in a hotel in central Helsinki and took meetings there. Others bought a whole lot more — booths in the investor lounge cost around €5,000, we’re told — while some VCs went even further: Accel had its own tent. 

Founders said they braved the cold for networking more than the panel conversations; one suggested the entire event could have been focused on meetups. 

“I’ve had about 10 useful conversations each day,” said one founder — who, admittedly, had started lining up his meetings weeks in advance. It’s a great place for building relationships, said several others — but not the right place to come to if you’re desperate to close a deal. “I saw a lot of founders running around like headless chickens,” said one entrepreneur. Other founders also bypassed Slush and chose to hang out in Helsinki to network. 

Other tips offered up for future founders heading to the event: go with a group of other founders, whether as part of one of the many government delegations (India and South Korea had stands, while the Endeavor group from Greece chartered a plane), or just organise a WhatsApp group with a bunch of people you know. It’s a good way to get yourself invited to all the side events.

I also met a handful of scaleup founders who were over from the US to scope out expansion opportunities. One was getting cold feet after hearing about Europe’s worker rights — “You can’t just fire people!”. The American contingent made up 8% of the VCs at the event, 11% of the LPs and 5% of the startups and operators. 

Notable absences: Harry Stebbings didn’t make his fireside chat; OpenAI didn’t show up for a breakfast on regulation with Finnish President Alexander Stubb and several European MEPs; and LPs were, GPs complained, few and far between. (There were 270 listed on the app, out of 3,300 investors.) 

Notable presences: Johannes Schildt of healthtech Kry turned up in Helsinki on Wednesday night just for a dinner and networking; Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky was flanked by fanboys at VC firm Visionaries’s after party; and a certain high-profile exited CEO-turned-venture partner got rather grumpy when asked to queue with everyone else on the guestlist to enter that same party.

— Amy Lewin, editor

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London-based Nivoda, a digital marketplace for the diamond industry, raised $51m in funding. Northzone led the round and was joined by investors including Avenir, Headline, Abstract Ventures and Canaan Partners.

Paris-based Faircraft, which makes in lab-grown leather, raised €15m in funding from investors including Kindred Ventures, Cap Horn, Bpifrance, Sake Bosch, Entrepreneur First, Alliance for Impact and Heirloom.

Milan, Italy-based Cardo AI, which uses AI tools to make structured finance more accessible, raised $15m in Series A funding. Blackstone Innovations Investment, Fintop Capital and Jam Fintop led the round and were joined by investors including Andy Horwitz and Kevin MacDonald (Black Mountain Systems cofounders).

Antwerp, Belgium-based Apideck, which develops tools to help developers integrate APIs, raised $7.5m in Series A funding. Airbridge Equity Partners led the round and was joined by investors including PMV.

Swansea, UK-based Three-Sixty Aquaculture, which uses recirculating aquaculture system technology to produce prawns, raised £3.5m in Series A funding. PrimeStar Industries led the round and was joined by investors including Marcus Wareing (celebrity chef) and Matthew Freud (head of Freud Communications).

Lyon, France-based Eden AI, which develops an AI integration platform that simplifies AI adoption for businesses, raised €3m in seed funding. Galion.exe led the round and was joined by investors including 50 Partners, Olivier Pomel (Datadog cofounder), Sébastien Pahl (Docker cofounder) and Alix de Sagazan (Abtasty cofounder).

Tampere, Finland-based Delta Cygni Labs, which develops a real-time API accelerator to optimise network performance, raised €3m in seed funding. First Gate Invest led the round and was joined by investors including StartMore, Therman Group, Ukko Lappalainen (Nokia former VP), Sami Sivonen (professional race driver), Jari Mieskonen (Conor Venture Partners managing partner) and Fuyuki Fujiwara (angel investor)

Amsterdam-based LearnWise, a university student experience platform, raised €2m in seed funding. Emerge led the round.

Manchester, UK-based Dote, which uses AI tools to develop parenting products like sleep monitoring devices, raised £1.15m in funding from investors including Luke Pilfold-Thomas (WeDo cofounder) and Dominic Miller (Fishawack Communications cofounder).

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