Why is Stockholm, a capital city with a population less than one million, home to global brands such as Skype, Spotify, Klarna and Minecraft? "I think it has to do with the Swedish creed," says Ben Eliass, CEO of bodycare brand Estrid. "It's a nation which put emphasis on high-quality education and invested heavily in telecoms infrastructure in the nineties, so we all grew up with high-speed internet." "It allows people to take high risk and start companies, not needing to be too afraid of the downsides," says Max Junestrand, CEO of legaltech startup Leya. Indeed, Sweden has now produced more unicorns per capita than any other country in Europe, except for Estonia, earning a reputation as the Silicon Valley of Europe"Stockholm has a truly unique ecosystem where you can stand on the shoulders of giants," says Colin Treseler, CEO of Supernormal.

We're on a mission to bring people the knowledge they need to make a difference in the world. Glean was founded by a seasoned team of former Google search and Facebook engineers, who wondered why we don't have an easier way of finding what we need at work. In our personal lives, we have tools to help us find pretty much whatever we need. Why don't we have that at work? And that was the beginning of Glean.

Traditionally, more complex software is harder to use. Nabeel Hyatt, general partner at Spark Capital, says that if Adept's team (pictured) achieves its full potential, this may no longer be the case. Chatbots rule the day in AI for now, but soon, Adept cofounder David Luan predicts, AI won't just display unsettlingly human responses to typed queries, it will execute them. It will do what you would do with your computer for you. Granted such technology is still years away, but the speed of innovation in the AI space means we're talking about two to three years, according to Luan -- not decades.

In another sign that the current VC appetite for AI is insatiable, Adept, a startup building AI that "enables humans and computers to work together creatively to solve problems," yesterday announced that it raised $350 million in a Series B funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital. Forbes reports that the valuation was "at least" $1 billion. The cash injection brings Adept's total raised to $415 million, which co-founder and CEO David Luan says is being put toward productization, model training and headcount growth. "Giant foundation models for language and for images have shown astounding capabilities in the last few years. Adept is building on this momentum via a new kind of foundation model that can perform actions on any software tool using natural language," he said in a press release.

Swag has a long and patchy history in the world of business. For every hip pair of plaid socks, there are five t-shirts you may never wear, an itchy scarf, a notepad your kids might use, and an ugly mug; and most of all, likely thousands of dollars and lots of time invested to make those presents a reality. Now, a startup that has built a service to rethink the concept behind corporate gifts and make them more effective is today announcing a round of funding to continue expanding its business -- and one sign that it may be on to something is its progress so far. Alyce, a Boston startup that has built an AI platform that plugs into various other apps that you might use to interact and track your relationships with others in your working life -- sales prospects, business partners, colleagues -- and then uses the information to personalise gift recommendations for those people, has raised $30 million, a Series B that it will be using to continue building out its platform, signing up more users, and hiring more people for its team. This round is being led by General Catalyst, with Boston Seed Capital, Golden Ventures, Manifest, Morningside and Victress Captial -- all previous backers -- also participating.

Home fitness startup Tempo today closed a $60 million round to ramp up manufacturing of its $1,995 AI-powered gym system. In addition to bolstering its go-to-market efforts, Tempo says it will use the funds to expand its content offering with a second production studio. Shelter-in-place orders and office closures motivated by the pandemic sent fitness equipment sales skyrocketing over the past few months. A report commissioned by eBay found that between March and April of this year, home gym sales increased up to 20 times in some categories compared with the same time frame last year. NPD Group reported that in March alone, fitness equipment sales rose 130% year-over-year, with benches up a whopping 259%.

While attention continues to be focused on the rise and growing sophistication of voice-based interfaces, a startup that is using artificial intelligence to improve how we communicate through the written word has raised a round of funding to capitalise on its already profitable growth. Grammarly -- which provides a toolkit used today by 20 million people to correct their written grammar, suggest better ways to write things and moderate the tone of what they are saying depending on who will be doing the reading -- has closed a $90 million round of funding. Brad Hoover, the company's CEO, confirmed to TechCrunch that the funding catapults the company's valuation to more than $1 billion as it gears up to grow to more users by expanding Grammarly's tools and bringing them to more platforms. Today, Grammarly can be used across a number of browsers via browser extensions, as a web app, through mobile and on desktop apps, and through specific apps such as Microsoft Office. But in our current era of communication, the number of places where we write to each other is expanding all the time -- consider, for example, how much we use chat and texting apps for leisure and for work -- so expect that list to continue growing.

PathAI, a startup that employs machine learning techniques to improve diagnostic accuracy, today announced that it's raised $60 million in series B funding led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, with General Catalyst participating. It brings its total venture capital raised to about $75 million, following an $11 million series A financing round, which CEO and cofounder Dr. Andy Beck said will be used to enhance PathAI's existing offerings, drive improvement of its platform, and fuel research and development into new tools and devices. "Our goal has been clear since day one – a relentless drive to ensure patients get the right diagnosis and the most effective treatment. We're looking forward to working with our partners to scale this effective approach across disease areas and around the world," Beck said. "The global network and deep expertise in technology and life sciences brought by General Atlantic, alongside the continued support of existing investors like General Catalyst, can only enhance our ability to effect change toward this major, impactful objective."

Customer and partner expansion and industry recognition signal rapid adoption of company's sales and learning platform together with funding led by General Catalyst Allego, the sales learning and coaching platform, today announced the close of a strong quarter, in which the company added key new customers, renewed 100 percent of its existing customer base and garnered solid industry recognition for its mobile-friendly sales learning platform. Allego also announced it has closed a $7.5M investment led by General Catalyst. "Partnering with visionary sales and training leaders and our team's focus on ensuring their success continued to drive great results for both Allego and our customers in the first half of 2018" "Partnering with visionary sales and training leaders and our team's focus on ensuring their success continued to drive great results for both Allego and our customers in the first half of 2018," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego. "We're excited to see the modern learning paradigm -- characterized by easily created and absorbed content, provided continuously and in bite-sized pieces, with reinforcement and support for informal learning -- rapidly gaining traction across sales training and corporate L&D." As it has since inception, Allego continues to fund its growth through positive operating cash flow.

You would think at least one AI-powered humanoid bot would have a properly nerdy name. Maybe a Poindexter or Hildegarde to add some natural language processing to your customer chat app? Instead, it sounds like the cool kids are in charge at most digital assistant and bot startups. Think short, peppy names that top the popular baby name lists. There's Aiden and Riley putting AI to work for marketers.