Saplo’s founder and CEO Mattias Tyrberg tipped us that Saplo, the Swedish semantic text processing technology firm, and a winner of Seedcamp, is going to participate in two VC events in California (previous coverage of Saplo). While in the area, Mattias and Fredrik Hörte from Saplo will also visit a few big firms like Google and Facebook, and look for other potential partners, customers, and investors.

The first event is Mini Seedcamp, which aims to give the startups a chance to meet face-to-face with the local startup and investor scene, and discuss anything from their product to investments. Seedcamp hopes to give the Valley folks better understanding of European startups, and show the participating European startups the US entrepreneurship culture in action, and help them connect with advisors and mentors.

Another event is organized by Invest in Sweden Agency North America (ISA). ISA has gathered a delegation of 20 Swedish early stage wireless, IT, electronics, and internet startups seeking risk capital, and takes them in front of some of the biggest VC firms in the US. The event takes place tomorrow November 11th in Menlo Park, CA. ISA is reporting to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and markets Sweden, its industry clusters, funds and individual businesses to North American companies and investors.

TechCrunch UK just reported (here) that Spotify, a Swedish startup offering a lightweight software application enabling on demand streaming of music, is rumoured to have raised €15m round (massive €71.6m pre-money valuation) from a Scandinavian VC fund Northzone Ventures.

As TechCrunch UK commented “Northzone themselves have declined to comment, but Creandum, another of Sweden’s top VCs, is also understood to have taken part in the funding round.”

ArcticStartup met Creandum at Seedcamp in London and a partner at Creandum told us that he is very excited about Spotify when we asked what are the most interesting Swedish startups at the moment. On the face of it this would support the rumor, even though we can’t confirm it either.

I interviewed Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK on the European startup ecosystem and how he sees it versus the US one while I was visiting Seedcamp in London. I told Mike that we need to make entrepreneurship sexier here in Europe and get more role models for students and young guns to look up to. See what Mike told me and what he thinks of the Scandi startup scene in particular.

We will be discussing the state of the European startup scene here in Helsinki tomorrow night at the ArcticEvening (see more here). Come meet the local startup scene and enjoy a laid-back evening with us.

Seedcamp winners have been announced just a few hours ago in London. This year 7 companies were picked for a 50k€ investment and a three month mentoring period. The winners this year are:

uberVU: Tracking comments on your social media content
Kyko: Casual gaming inside MSN / Live Messenger
Basekit - Make building complex webapplications easy.
Soup.io - Personal publishing on the web made easy
Toksta - Provide instant messaging systems for social networks
Mobclix - Iphone analytics
StupeFlix - Smart video slideshows from photographs

Via The Next Web

Neither Scred nor Saplo made it all the way to the winners’ table this year, but I’m sure they have experienced a lot of valuable things that will take them far next year.

Edit: Here’s TechCrunchUK’s take on the Seedcamp 08 winners.

I chatted with Saplo’s CEO, Mattias Tyrberg, this morning just before they were going to present to the investors at the Seedcamp final. Mattias told me that they were ready for the challenge. We will find out whether they made it and got the investment on Friday morning. Here’s our previous coverage on Saplo. Good luck to the whole team.