Founded in 2018 by Markku Lorentz, Pengu Studios aimed to enhance the TTRPG experience through its innovative platform. In 2023, the company secured a small investment of € 50.000 (SEK600.000) in funding thru Connect Sverige, I Love Lund, and Destination Dalby. Despite these efforts, Pengu Studios struggled to gain sufficient traction. The company reported net revenue of SEK0.5 million in 2023, managing to break even.

Recently, Pengu Studios announced that its core platform would be free to play, aiming to attract a wider audience. However, this move was not enough to sustain the business.

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Freedrum was founded in 2016 by George Charkviani and has since raised over € 2.4 million (SEK 28 million) in equity funding from Almi Invest, LAUNCH Accelerator, and angel investors. Despite reporting a net revenue of SEK 6.1 million in 2023, Freedrum faced financial challenges, with a loss of SEK 10.7 million that year.

The company aimed to revolutionize drum practice by providing an affordable, portable, and silent solution for drummers through its Electronic Drumsticks and Freedrum Studio app. The Freedrum kit enabled users to practice with dynamic control and timing precision and shared a vision of making drumming accessible anytime, anywhere. However, despite initial interest and investment, it struggled with profitability, culminating in the current closure following a corporate restructuring attempt earlier in May.

The post Freedrum’s Journey at its End? Virtual Drum Kit Startup Goes Bankrupt for the Second Time appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Back in 2021, Youcruit was riding high with fresh capital, thousands of haulers in the U.S. using its Lanefinder platform, and plans for an upcoming IPO.

Despite these high aspirations, Youcruit’s growth failed to accelerate. The company’s gross revenue peaked at just € 1 million in 2022, while it recorded a record loss of almost € 6 million. The startup struggled with a monthly burn rate of over € 250.000, heavily reliant on continual capital injections to sustain operations.

According to sources, the company was unable to secure sufficient new capital, which led to the decision to declare bankruptcy.

Despite the financial turbulence and the bankruptcy, the acquisition of Youcruit’s assets suggests that its core technology and business model may continue under new ownership. This sale might provide Youcruit with a second chance to realize its potential in the evolving job recruitment market, especially within the logistics and transportation sectors. The future of Youcruit now depends on the strategic direction and investments from its new owner, who appears ready to revitalize the platform and possibly steer it back to profitability.

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This decision to file for bankruptcy, including its subsidiary Bonzun Evolve, was announced after efforts to adapt the business model and expand services failed to meet expectations. Interim CEO and shareholder Micael Gustafsson expressed that despite exhaustive efforts to save the company, the reduction in service compensation by Region Stockholm and the lack of financial support from major shareholders left them with no other choice.

“It’s incredibly sad for everyone and in the long run for healthcare in Sweden, which unfortunately now discards one of the world’s best treatments for serious sleep problems.”

Gustafsson lamented the impact this would have on the treatment of serious sleep disorders in Swedish healthcare.

For more details, you can read the full article here.

The post Learning 2 Sleep Files for Bankruptcy Amidst Financial Struggles appeared first on Øresund Startups.

This move has resulted in notable investors such as Dan Olofsson losing their stakes in the company.

Radinn was founded in 2013 by Philip Werner, a sports enthusiast and economics student at Lund University, who had the idea to equip a wakeboard with an electric motor. The company began selling the boards in 2016, but Werner left the company that same year due to a dispute with the then-CEO Alexander Lind and started a competing firm called Awake, which sells a more expensive electric surfboard. Radinn’s current leadership, with CEO Mathias Bergman and Vice CEO Calle Håkansson, took over in 2018. They had a past experience from bello.se and hittahem.se.

“It is unfortunate that Radinn couldn’t boost its sales. The owners have financed negative cash flows for several years, but there comes a point when these opportunities are no longer available.”

Dan Olfosson told Rapidus

Rapidus reports that Radinn generated over €11 million in revenue 2022, but still had losses, which in 2022 where also around €11 million.

It is reported that Radinn’s management hopes that a new owner will see value in the company, particularly in its significant inventory and proprietary technology.

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We have followed the story over the years, and already in 2017 at the start of their journey we made an interview with Uniti founder Lewis Horne. There he amongst other talked about the need to “Don’t be afraid to be different”. And normal is certainly not how Uniti was.

If you want to get an insight what happened, read the article that Swedish magazine Filter recently posted: magasinetfilter.se/granskning/uniti/. It is in Swedish, but a long and good crafted article that follows what happened the different years, with the intro: “The worlds most innovative, modern and sustainable car company is Swedish. It has no engineers, no factory and causes no pollutions. How is that possible?”

After a period of silence lately from Uniti and it’s founder, the company has now filed for bankruptcy. Lewis Horne has set up a Youtube channel, where he said he will answer questions relating to what happened, and how a startup that was so hyped could fail.

You can follow the channel here, where Lewis has said he will answer questions: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3oJV0QGcjw

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The tech company, which builds on research at Lund University, has since the start been funded with a total in the range of SEK 500 million (€ 50 million), including support from the Swedish Energy Agency and the EU. Also among the shareholders are Industrifonden, Nano Future Invest, the Wallenbergs Foundation Foundation Asset Management, the Norwegian Kagra Group and the Saudi Riyadh Valley Company. With their patented technology Aerotaxy, currently Sol Voltaics had been on their way to reach mass production of SolFilm, which can increase solar panel efficiency by 50%.

However, their development did not go as they had planned, which is the reason why investors decided to stop the capital injection. Sol Voltaics’ CEO Erik Smith said that they would need another two or three years and 200-250 million SEK to reach their goal, but their investors seem unwilling to support the company. Per Anell, investment manager at Industrifonden, one of the biggest investor of Sol Voltaic explained the reason why they stopped investing in Sol Volatics as follows,

“We invest in companies with very high potential and risk, it is our business model and sometimes it does not go as planned. Sol Voltaics did not develop at the pace planned and in this area very large sums of money are required. The owner consortium therefore wanted to find a new partner who could enter new capital, but when it did not, we had to pull the brake.”

Now, Sol Voataics is looking for the way to continue their business. They have developed a lot of patented technologies which are valuable in the field of biotechnology for developing biosensors, and for the development of nanotubes. That someone will buy the intellectual properties and the business will survive in new areas where their technology can be applied is one scenario. Schedule a free Consultation with a bankruptcy lawyer los angeles to get in charge of your finances.

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Kronaby has been in the news a lot, and had big plans. Being positioned here it drew advantage of the strong mobile skills that are in this region, both for hardware and software. It reached sales of just over SEK 37 million (€ 3.5 million) in 2017, but made an operating loss of close to SEK 127 million (€ 12 million), the latest public available numbers. It had raised at least € 10 million when it was started, in 2015.

“The company is insolvent which is not of a temporary nature and therefore requests that the district court puts the applicant into bankruptcy”,

– writes Animas’ Chairman of the Board Peng Peng and CEO Pål Borge in the bankruptcy application, which was submitted to the Malmö District Court during last Wednesday morning, according to Sydsvenskan. The application also states that the company has about 60 employees. In light of the dire financial situation, the company’s leadership is actively considering the option of initiating a company liquidation UK, aligning it with their strategic approach to tackle the insolvency problem.

CEO Pål said that it was a funding that was planned for december from Goertek that did not go thru as planned. However, he believes there are chances for doing a fresh start.

The post Hyped startups folds: Kronaby smart watches files for bankruptcy appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“Logistics is costly for online retailers. About 8-15% of the revenue goes to cover logistics cost. Secondly, logistics is key to the customer experience and key reason for shopping offline. Yet the logistics industry (the largest industry in the world) remain as one of the most conservative, in-transparent and in-effective services from a customer viewpoint.” Kenneth says.

So there obviously was a market, and every e-commerce company had the problem, as well as ned users. On top of that, the team had experience from startups, and Kenneth had himself worked with Rocket Internet and launched e-commerce stores for them on the other side of the world. Sounds like a perfect team and a sweet spot for building a company! However, it was turned out it wasn’t. Kenneth has just made a post-mortem blogpost about what went wrong. You can read it here. In it are reasons why the startup failed:

“We expected resistance from the carriers, but it took us more than a year to get a shipping agreement with PostNord [largest carrier in DK]. Even then and throughout the lifetime of Shipbeat, PostNord tried to prevent Shipbeat from re-selling their services. This was unexpected as PostNord paradoxically is required by law to sell some of their key services to anyone.”

Kenneth writes in the post, before continuing:

“Our plan was to build internally a broker/marketplace business for logistics. That required hiring entrepreneurial minded people with logistics experience and network to build relations at C-level with the carriers. That proved virtually impossible to find. “

He also writes about strategic decisions they took, and what led to the final decision, so close the company.

“Our best option was to get a shipping broker or similar on board as investor or acquirer. One who could provide a competitive logistics setup that we could power up with the Shipbeat software. That could have led leap-frogging the competition and ultimately deliver on our value proposition widely. After a good process with meaningful dialogues, but with no deal reasonably insight we [founders, board, and investors] could not justify taking more money into the company.”

The startup had raised a little over € 1 million in funding and loans. If you are interesting in the challenges of building a startup, and how it can go wrong even if almost everything is aligned, you should read the entire blogpost.

We wish the team and entrepreneurs all the best in their next venture!

The post Shipbeat files for bankruptcy appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Launch and early success

Launched in 2013 Fitbay has received a great deal of media attention for their service and rightly so. In the day and age with information overload and lack of time, a tool that can take away some of the stress from decision-making is always welcome to our app toolboxes. American Forbes described Fitbay as a promising Nordic startup, which “eliminates the frustration when you have to find clothes,” because you automatically matched with people who have the same style and size.

User count has also proven Fitbay a success. Back in April the number of Fitbay active users was growing between 40 and 60 per cent a month. And only two weeks ago the company reported a quarter of a million users.

Financing

The potential of the service was also noticed by the investors. In total Fitbay has attracted over € 1.6 million (12 million DKK) in venture capital from Steadfast Venture Capital, Swedish Creandum and also Jesper Buch. However, while the initial capital was sufficient for keeping the company going, Fitbay didn’t manage to get more money to continue it’s operations in Denmark, reporting over a million DKK in loss over the last year and consequently filing for bankruptcy this fall, reported in Finans.dk.

A partner at Creandum Martin Hauge comments the situation:

“The company performed not as we would have liked it, but those are the terms of the venture market. It is the risks we have to face when investing in startups.”

The future

Fitbay ApS is a subsidiary of US Fitbay Inc in Delaware, USA, which is a holding company. This means that it is the Danish development office with 12 employees that went bankrupt. And since the holding company is the one that owns the rights to the website, it is still possible to run parts of the business even if you are a bankrupt, according to the law. You can reach out to bankruptcy lawyers for legal advice when going through bankruptcy. Reid & Hellyer are top-notch bankruptcy lawyers who have been serving Southern California for more than 125 years! And, therefore, according to Christian Wylonis, the founder and CEO, Fitbay in the US will continue to run. The rest of the company’s future is so far unclear. But we are hoping to hear some good news in the times to come! You can talk to Marc Brown, P.A. in Fort Lauderdale lawyer to help you figure out the legal matters.

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