Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

AI legal tech company Legora has raised $150 million at a $1.8 billion valuation Series C. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Legora has 400+ law firms and in-house legal teams as customers across in markets.

Legora has offices in Stockholm, London, New York, Denver and Sydney and employes almost 200 people. The plan is to double in size (to almost 400 people, I’d assume) and establish more offices around the world.

Extremely impressive development since I saw CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand present the company at SSE Ventures demo day in August 2023.

You should read a couple of posts of my friend James Pember’s Substack (and subscribe if you like them).

James, who is VP Product at Komo Technologies and founded Sparta Sales, writes about how AI products, product management/development, work and related topics.

It is a good read!

1X has opened for pre-orders of the NEO Gamma home robot, either $20,000 to own or $499 per month.

Web browsers with AI automation, like the Swedish-developed Strawberry and ChatGPT Atlas, are really starting to show how a new type of interaction with the web and web-based product can (and likely will) work. It is fascinating to explore and learn what can be done when the browser can run agents that do things for the end-user.

It is also interesting to think about how that is likely to change a bunch of things which could have significant economic/productivity impact.

My colleague Arne Tonning has been interviewed on the podcast Venture Capital Unlocked.

It’s a good interview (ok, I’m a nerd when it comes to investing) and gives great insight into Arne’s insights and values, and also into how Alliance VC thinks about early-stage venture investing.

Spotify today announced that founder Daniel Ek will stop being CEO in January 2026 and will be replaced by current co-presidents and long-term executives Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström. More in a letter to employees and press release.

Day-to-day I think it will mostly be business as usual, even if Wall Street and investors will get two new faces of the company.

Bloomberg reports (free TechCrunch rewrite) that Oura is raising $875 million in a Series E with a valuation of $10.9 billion (also known as decacorn territory).

One should always be a little cautious with what the actual valuation, as it differs if one values all the share classes separately or just takes the valuation per share in the latest preference class and times that with all outstanding shares.

However, reaching $10+ billion in valuation is extremely impressive. Especially with about $1 billion in revenue (split about 80% from hardware and 20% from subscriptions) growing 50%.

One lesson from Oura, I believe, is that it is extremely valuable to be the market leader in a growing segment as it drives a premium valuation multiple.

Tandem Health has announced that, following Kinnevik leading its Series A financing, Christina Stenbeck is joining its board of directors.

Highlighting board representation in a startup usually makes very little sense, and for non-Swedes this time is likely no different.

But Christina Stenbeck is the largest shareholder in Kinnevik and the oldest daughter of Jan Stenbeck, who before his death had turned Kinnevik into the original Wallenberg/Investor challenger, many years before Sebastian Siemiatkowski stated he wanted to turn Flat Capital and his Klarna ownership into such a challenger (which I think sounds very exciting).

After a run of being one of Europe’s best venture and growth investors around 2010 (often teaming up with the Samwer brothers with major stakes in Zalando and other Rocket Internet companies), Kinnevik around 2019-2024 decided to cull its portfolio of more mature and often dividend paying companies to become a pure play growth-stage investor (becoming more like a growth fund than a traditional Swedish investmentbolag).

In practice this, unfortunately, turned Kinnevik from a Wallenberg/Investor challenger into something that looks like a publicly traded growth fund trading at significant discount to NAV (net asset value). The strategy change was not helped timing-wise by having a majority of NAV in non-public growth companies that still were/are loss making during 2022-2025.

Christina Stenbeck left the Kinnevik board in 2016 (but remained on the boards of Spotify and Zalando for several years) and rejoined the board earlier this year, which has given Kinnevik investors hope of a better future after a few years of weak stock performance.

Tandem Health is, in my opinion, one of three current frontrunners of high international quality among Swedish AI application startups and that Kinnevik both made the investment and now is putting the main person on its board is hopefully a positive sign both for Tandem Health and Kinnevik.

The proposal is to acquire Klarna shares valued at about 9.5 billion SEK and would make Sebastian Siemiatkowski own about 85 % of Flat Capital and control ca 96 % of the votes. And, initially, Flat Capital would become a tracking stock, of sorts, of Klarna.

Unexpected to me, but will be fun to follow how it develops.

Workday has announced that it will acquire Stockholm-founded Sana Labs for $1.1 billion in cash (with closing expected before January 31st, 2026).

This can have a significant impact on the Stockholm ecosystem as a large share of Sana’s shareholders are Swedish, that could recycle some of the gains.

Congrats to Joel and the rest of the team!