After several years of declining in sales, Alphageek AB who owns Roligaprylar.se has returned to growth again. The figure reached 20 million SEK (2.12 million Euro) in last year from 16 million SEK (1.69 million Euro) in 2015.

In early 2015, Anton and Oscar Troedson from Malmö-based sortiment.se took over Alphageek AB from Net Departo.  After that, it seems they have set the company to the right track.

“2016 has been a very good year for Alphageek with high growth, a substantial broadening of the products offering and better customer satisfaction. With the size, experience and economies of scale Adlibris group provides, we are confident that Alphageek is in the right hands”，says Anton Troedson from Alphageek AB.

Alphageek AB now consists of online stores Roligaprylar.se, Alphageek.no, Alphageek.fi and Alphageek.dk with a niche focusing on toys, gifts and party gadgets. Adlibris Group believes this meets its growth strategy to a broader product range. Adlibris Group now consists of e-commerce sites as Adlibris, Discshop, Bamba, Odla and Kökets favoriter. The turnover of the group is close to 1.8 billion SEK (0.19 billion Euro)in 2016.

The post Adlibris buys up Roliga Prylar appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

“We have for some time been looking for a partner who can take over the operation and responsibility for AlphaGeek. With Sortiment.se we get a committed partner, who not only has previous experience of AlphaGeek’s products, but who also knows how to run the business effectively” says Anders Andersen, CEO of Net Departo.

Sortiment.se has a long-term strategy to build a broad portfolio of e-commerce stores, which will provide a broad product catalogue for the Scandinavian consumers. The acquisition of AlphaGeek is an important one; the size of it helps Sortiment.se to build their infrastructure for e-commerce.

”We are happy and excited about the acquisition of AlphaGeek. The company is not only an icon in the Swedish e-commerce, but also a store with a niche and product range that suits us as individuals really good” says Anton Troedson, founder of Sortiment.se and new CEO of AlphaGeek.

Sortiment.se, is also based in the region, being in Eslöv, and is a smaller company than RoligaPrylar, so in that way the company is taking the entire business to a new level. This merger of Sortiment.se and AlphaGeek will make them to one of the larger e-commerce store in Scandinavia for toys, presents and gadgets with an approximate turnover in 2015 of 4 million €. The main competitor is also in this region – with Malmö-based Coolstuff, which reported a turnover of just below € 11 million last year.

Roliga Prylar got a lot of attention when the site was started for being run by Dan Nilsson, who became famous for his open and transparent blogging about it and other ventures (you can read the old blogposts here). Dan sold the majority of the company to Net Departo in 2013, and now the company has changed hands completely. Dan has since moved on to new projects in the e-commerce sector, being one of the co-founders of Fyndiq, as well as behind the largest Scandinavian e-commerce community ehandel.se and co-founder of the translation service Contentor (transparency: Karsten Deppert, who is the initiator of this site, is also a co-founder at Contentor). He also just recently making news with two new ambitious projects: e-handelsindex and the E-commerce Park of Sweden.

The post A new owner for RoligaPrylar appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Indexing the entire e-commerce scene

Development of the e-commerce index (Ehandelsindex) tool began in 2010. A year later Dan Nilsson landed at number 20 with this project in the list of entrepreneurs of the year. Today, four years later, e-commerce index is finally launched in beta version and has already listed over 11,000 e-commerce ventures in Sweden – the starting point of for it. The service gathers data automatically and is the most comprehensive information about Sweden’s e-commerce available, and companies are verified and reviewed manually.

The interesting part of the index is that it connects company’s data with many e-retailers to show profitability, sales and economic development of various industries over time. There is also an opportunity to use some external data sources, but this feature is not yet available.

“E-commerce index is currently available in beta and we’re still working to fine-tune all parameters and the system in general. We are also working to align all the classifications and measurements. Our journey has begun, but we are certainly not at its goal yet,” says Dan Nilsson

If you check e-commerce index, you can find plenty of interesting information about the industry in general. For example, how many Swedish e-retailers accept Bitcoin (0.22%) or whether delivery service makes any difference for company’s performance (companies using PostNord services are observed to have higher profitability than those that use DHL, but both have positive incomes). At the same time, e-commerce index offers plenty of information about individual companies which includes data on their latest financial statements, credit rating, profit margin and much more.

There is a number of reports about about e-commerce industry and its performance such as by DIBS, PostNord, and HUI. The main shortcoming of such reports is that they are survey-based. With the help of e-commerce index, however, it will be possible to also get some hard numbers for more detailed industry analysis.

Physical space for e-commerce

The newly created E-commerce Park of Sweden, in turn, will enhance e-commerce by helping companies to solve the most common problems related to logistics, operations or warehouses. Co-founded by Dan Nilsson and Karsten Deppert (transperancy: Karsten Deppert is also the initiator of this site), the e-commerce park is located in Helsingborg, that has perfect combination of entrepreneurship and logistics.

“We start with about 2,000 sqm of office space and 5,000 sqm warehouse. The hope is that already within 2 years there will be growing need to expand,” says Karsten Deppert, co-founder.

The park is also planned to become a hub of energy, creativity and effective solutions that will help entrepreneurs in the e-commerce field to learn quicker from each-other and help the industry to flourish.

Dan and Karsten have already previously a joint company, the webcontent and translation service Contentor. This is the second time they co-found an e-commerce related venture.

The post E-commerce veteran unviels two new interesting ventures appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Above is a spreadsheet from my investment newsletter club with all the investments that we have gotten to our attention during 2013.
Disclaimer: There are, most likely, many more investments that we do not know about (yet), and we will try to update the document when we get to know about more.

Some interesting stats from investments in the region 2013

Updated 2014-01-02: got more information from Hampus Jakobsson. If you have any further info we should add, let us know.

• Total sum of investments: 55 million euros (roughly, with qualified estimates in those cases where the sum is unknown)
• Total number of investments: 52
• Most number of investments: SEED Capital (7)
• Largest investments: Sol Voltaics and Vivino

As can be seen from the numbers, none of them is big single investment (such as last years € 45M investment in Zendesk). So this year it has been mostly seed, series A and series B investments in the region.

Other interesting things from 2013

A very noteworthy happening from 2013 was Unitys rumored ‘no thanks’ to a € 575 million deal. Very interesting for them and the whole startup and gaming scene in the region!

There where also some interesting crowdfunding projects, most notably the release of the game Forced which got a lot of attention for its story, but also gadgets such as Leikr and NSA defeating services such as Heml.is. Also two very high profile ones, that however are still ongoing – Airtame and No More Woof. These are not in the list (even though they are already 100% financed) because they will first close in the beginning of 2014.

Why a focus on investments and funding?

We look at investment and funding for a couple of reasons:

1. It is relatively easy to get the information.
2. A startup that receives investment is ‘validated’ – it is not just a cool idea, somebody believes in it enough to put money into it.
3. Especially the later stage investment rounds (series A and above) are crucial for a startup to make it big. Therefor we deem those as very important.

What do we think about bootstrapping?

Our focus on investments does not mean that we think bootstrapping is in any way wrong. Indeed, my own company, Contentor, is bootstrapped. However, bootstrapping is in my opinion something that is great, especially in the first 1-5 years, but after that to grow truly international and make a difference, funding is almost always needed. Not just for the money and the people that can be hired because of the investment. It’s just as much for the connections and knowledge that the right investors bring. Connections such as inside-people at Google, Facebook or other important collaborators for the startup. Or connections to goverment and politicians that are relevant. Or for further investments and a future IPO. Having people onboard who have experience from earlier in very helpful in those cases.
So I believe bootstrapping is great to get going, try the product and build the first million euros in revenue. But to take it to the next level, to reach € 10M or more in revenue, funding often makes the crucial differences and speeds up the process.

Because of this, we care about funding here at Øresund startups.

Reporting on other stats as well

We will aim to try to get more numbers out in the future. Both Sweden and Denmark have core company numbers available for companies public. We will see what kind of report we can build form that – such as matching the startups in region to their revenues!

The post Updated: The year of 2013 – investments in startups in the region appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

One of the things we want to focus on with Øresund Startups is tracking funding in startups in the region. The reason is simple: funding is an external validation that proves that somebody believes in a startup, and that it is not just a great idea, but also an idea that can be executed. We also believe that it is of interest for others seeking funding to know what funding deals have been made, and who possible investors are.

Therefor we have put together the data that we have been notified about the last 6 month, january – june 2013. We have done that in an simple spreadsheet, and listed a couple of data points:

• Date (approximatly)
• Invested amount (when disclosed)
• What startup
• Which investors
• Business sector of the startups (if B2B or B2C)
• What cluster in the region the startup belongs to

Some interesting investment highlights from the first 6 month of 2013:

Update: after publishing this we got some feedback with more investments we had missed. The numbers below are updated with the newest stats!

Of the investments we have registered:

• A total of 28 investments have been tracked. The total is not officially known, but our estimations and words from unofficial sources put the total to between 18-21 million euros.
• 14 of the 28 investments are Copenhagen based
• The biggest investment was in Crunchfish, but it was only slightly larger then others
• More or less equal B2B then B2C startups have received funding (14 B2B and 13 B2C and 1 that is both)
• SEED Capital was the most active investment fund
• SEED Capital was also the fund which has invested the most money in the period (according to released numbers)
• Half of the investments (14 of the 28) where from private investors, either a known angel / VC or a multitude of angels.
• Private investments also account for roughly half of the total value invested, around 8-10 million euros of the total 18-21 million euros (estimated in cases where not publicly known)

Note that the list above is only with data from 1 january – 30 june 2013. The recent big investments in Vivino as well as Opbeat are not part of it, they will be part of the next report.

As a bonus we also put together the numbers for our first month of operations, september – december 2012. However, as that is not a complete 6 month period we did not want to make a full report of that. The numbers can be found in the spreadsheet, in the second tab. These numbers may also be quite incomplete, as during that period we just started tracking startups and might have missed a lot.

Also – if you know about investments which we have missed, let us know! Either in an email or in the community group.

The stats are embeded at the top of the posts, but if you have trouble viewing them you can find them here as a Google Drive spreadsheet.

If you want to download the numbers as .csv you can find them here.

The post Updated! Report: investments in web and tech startups in the region – spring 2013 appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Now Roliga Prylar takes it’s first steps outside Sweden. With the launch of Alphageek.dk, the Danish site is up and running (even if still some improvements left to do according to Dan).

“We have ambitious plans for growth, a big part of this growth will come from new markets with focus on the nordic countries. We launched Denmark first because it was the first country to be ready. Finland will launch next week and Norway before july is over.”

This is one of the many changes that has happened to Roliga Prylar the last year – getting investments from Net Departo Ventures being another big change, as well as out-sourcing their warehouse, something Dan earlier was very sceptic towards.

About launching under a different brand in Denmark, he says:

“We wanted a name that positioned us against the competition. We’re not mainstream, our main target customer is the geeks, gamers and nerds. And these days Geek is not a bad thing any more, but rather something people aspire to be. So basically we want a name people remember. The Alpha Geek is the most prominent geek in the office, the person with the most Objective C-books, the person who memorized 500 decimals of Pi, basically the person all geeks want to become”

Appart from the fact that the name “roliga prylar” might not have been so good in Danish anyway – given the very big difference in the meaning of the word “rolig” in Swedish (rolig=fun) compared to Danish (rolig=calm).

If the new brand will be used in Sweden as well in the future is still not comfirmed, where the site still operates under the Roliga Prylar name.

Transperacy: Dan Nilsson is also co-founder of Contentor, where I also am co-founder. Also Retevo AB, the company behind Alphageek / Roliga Prylar just moved into their offices at SHIP co-working space, which my company is in charge off. This has nothing to do with the article but should be mentioned as I believe in honesty and transparency /Karsten

The post Alphageek launched in Denmark – the first expansion from Dan Nilsson appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Which setback did you learn the most from?

“The biggest lesson in the last while was when my business got bought. I have strived to make an exit, to sell my webshop, for ten to eleven years. As an entrepreneur you miss a boss who says: “Well done”, but making an exit is an external confirmation that you did well. I figured that I would be satisfied with myself. But I have never felt such an anticlimax as when I signed the papers and got the money. I felt satisfaction for like twenty seconds after which I felt an urge to keep working, keep growing.”

“After that I got the worlds’ insight: that it is important that you have fun in those ten years… Now I only work with things that I think are fun.”

Read the full interview (in Swedish) here.

The post Interview with Dan Nilsson who recently sold Roliga Prylar appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

I’m incredibly happy with the deal. [The people behind] Net Departo are no suit-guys with powerpoints, but they are real e-retailers and contractors. With the expertise that comes into the company and the capital contribution made in connection with the acquisition, I think we certainly can achieve our goal of a turnover 100MSEK in the Nordic market, says Dan Nilsson (E-handel.se).

Anders Andersen from Net Departo Ventures leads the acquisition and mentions at E-handel.se that this is the start of a series of acquisitions in the Nordic e-market.

With the investment in RoligaPrylar.se, we get the best possible start to our series of e-commerce investments. The firm has a sound, growing business, which proves the concept, but there still is a lot of potential that we can help the company realize further.

The post Net Departo Ventures acquires majority stake in RoligaPrylar.se appeared first on Øresund Startup News.