When Charlotte Stigen Låstberg tells prospective customers how much chemical waste their factories generate, the reaction is usually the same: disbelief, then curiosity. The founder of Digiclean Solutions grew up around industrial chemicals—her family operated a chemical business—and she's spent the better part of two years convincing manufacturers that there's a smarter way to clean their equipment.
Now, with a €2.5 million seed round closed in mid-2026, the Swedish climate tech startup is ready to push that message across the Nordics and beyond. Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech co-led the funding, announced June 30, 2026, with participation from S-E-Bankens Utvecklingsstiftelse, Impact Shakers, and Feminvest Ventures. For Feminvest, which was Digiclean's earliest institutional backer, the round marked a milestone: the firm's initial stake has doubled in value at the seed close.
Jonathan Lannö from Almi Invest GreenTech is joining Digiclean's board. The capital will fund product development and fuel commercial expansion, first in Sweden, then across Nordic and European markets—a measured rollout, perhaps more cautious than the typical Silicon Valley blitz, but one that reflects the realities of selling into heavy industry.
Feminvest came in back in early 2025, though the exact check size wasn't disclosed at the time. Before that, EIT Manufacturing invested north of SEK 2 million (around €200,000) through its Accelerate Call programme in January 2025. The funding history, while modest by tech standards, speaks to a startup carefully assembling proof points before seeking larger capital.
Sensors, AI, and the Promise of Radical Efficiency
At its core, Digiclean is selling optimization—an AI-powered monitoring system that watches over industrial cleaning and processing baths in real time. Using sensors and machine learning, the platform automates chemical dosing with the kind of precision that manual operations struggle to achieve.
The pitch is striking, if the numbers hold up: a 60% reduction in chemical use, a 97% drop in wastewater, and a 50% cut in CO₂ emissions. Some customers, according to Digiclean's materials, have stretched bath lifecycles from every few weeks to just once a year—translating to what the company estimates at roughly €40,000 in annual savings per process. The company operates on a subscription model, a recurring revenue structure that investors in industrial software tend to favor.
Whether those figures scale across diverse manufacturing environments remains to be seen. Industrial cleaning varies wildly by sector, material, and contamination levels. But Digiclean has at least assembled early validation: over 20 sites in Sweden have deployed the platform. The company lists Volvo, SKF, and Parker Hannifin among its reference customers—household names in manufacturing that lend credibility to the model.
ROI timelines of under 12 months, if reproducible, would make Digiclean's system a relatively easy sell in industries where capital expenditure decisions crawl through layers of approval. Speed to payback matters in industrial procurement, often more than the size of long-term savings.
Beyond Metal: A Broader Ambition
Metal cleaning is Digiclean's entry point, but Låstberg and her team see adjacent opportunities. Pulp and paper processing, food and beverage production, water treatment—including the thorny challenge of PFAS remediation—and even defense applications are on the roadmap. Each sector brings its own regulatory landscape and operational quirks, which could either slow expansion or open up defensible niches.
Founded in 2024, Digiclean is still early. The team is small, the technology unproven at massive scale, and the sales cycle for industrial solutions notoriously long. But in a moment when climate tech investors are hunting for businesses with tangible impact metrics—and revenue to match—a startup that can point to real chemical reductions and named-brand customers has something to work with.
The question, as with any industrial tech play, is whether the solution is genuinely transformative or merely incremental—a nice-to-have that gets deprioritized when budgets tighten. Digiclean's doubled valuation suggests early believers think it's the former. The next twelve months will test whether that confidence spreads.
