Saying HI to all VCs and startup geeks seeking tech news about the startup investment deals in the CEE region! I am Anna from Next Road Ventures - venture capital fund backed by the global business angels, investing in the seed and series A European companies. Together with Vestbee matching platform we would like to introduce you to a new, monthly series of startup news from the Central & Eastern Europe region that will give you some insights into the CEE deal room. Without further ado let’s take a closer look at the November rounds!
Vinted
Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
Launch date: 2008
Funding Round: Series E $128M
Funding Source Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Burda Principal Investments, Sprints Capital, Insight Partners
Total funding received: $260.3M
The well known Vinted is an online marketplace and community building platform for users to sell, buy and swap second hand clothes and accessories. It was launched in 2008 in Lithuania, and 2 years later in the USA. Since the beginning, Vinted was supported by recognized VCs, among others Accel, a Silicon Valley VC with over 1.300 investments and 281 exits. By pocketing the recent E round funding of $128M, Vinted secured it’s $1B valuation and is now the first tech unicorn in Lithuania.
Tidio
Location: Szczecin, Poland
Launch date: 2014
Funding Round: €0,93M
Funding Source Inovo Venture Partners
Total funding received: €1.63M
Tidio is a livechat and chatbot software launched in 2014 and backed by two well-known Venture Capital Funds based in Poland - bValue and Inovo Venture Partners. With Tidio chatbots, companies can significantly increase their sales by keeping in constant contact with their clients online. The AI technology behind the chatbots recognizes consumers’ messages and can answer them accordingly 24/7. In case of more complex query, customer support employees can directly follow up the conversation. Tidio financing round took place at valuation of over €18,5M.
Instant Factoring
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Launch date: 2018
Funding Round: Seed €500K
Funding Source Constantine Goulimis, Educative, Xenofon Vodorouglou
Total funding received: €1M
Mission behind the Instant Factoring fintech is to help SME with developing a business, by providing them with alternative option of flexible financing. In simple words, it enables small and medium entrepreneurs to convert invoices into cash. All of that in less than 24h. What is not as simple as the description, is a technology behind the platform. Instant Factoring uses blockchain to ensure, that every transaction is transparent, together with AI-backed scoring technology evaluating the credit risk of the factoring process. Thev €500K funding round was a first private funding in the startup and it will be allocated to the further development in the region of Romania and Moldova. A startup forecasts, that by the end of 2022 approximately 15 000 of SMEs will be using the Instant Factoring platform.
Modash.io
Location: Tallinn, Estonia
Launch date: 2018
Funding Round: Seed $145K
Funding Source Icebreaker.vc, business angels
Total funding received: $287.2K
Modash, an Estonian marketing platform founded in 2018, makes it simple for marketers to reach the influencers exact for their audience. It is a search engine for finding social media influencers anywhere in the world, enriched with an analytical tool evaluating their target group characteristics and quality of followers. Modash provides an end-to-end solution allowing to build, launch and measure influencer marketing campaigns. It answers the problem of finding a relevant influencer for the specific audience. A CEO behind the idea, a Canadian Avery Schrader, is merely in his 20s and is already a well known entrepreneur in the Estonian startup environment, bringing a young spirit to the business.
PerfOps
Location: Cracow, Poland
Launch date: 2017
Funding Round: Seed $750K
Funding Source Sunfish Partners, Finch Capital
Total funding received: $1.25M
Polish startup backed by international investors from SunFish Partners and Finch Capital. PerfOps delivers global traffic and data analytics management solutions boosting the performance of the applications, at the same time reducing infrastructure costs of traffic flows optimization. PerfOps secures the optimal uptime on the servers, reduces traffic latency and maintains a load-balance by processing a billion of metrics and setting up benchmarks, provided later to the end-user. The team behind the complex tool consists of experienced developers and analytics with in-depth understanding of the market. Based in Cracow, the startup operates on the global level, serving over 3 000 from around the world and generating in specific traffic from UK, USA and Brazil.
Qoorio (Humansapp)
Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
Launch date: 2018
Funding Round: Seed €2M
Funding Source Mangrove Capital Partners, Mantas Mikuckas, Change Ventures, 70Ventures, Vytautas Kubilius
Total funding received: €2.5M
Qoorio is a social app platform connecting people with exceptional knowledge they are looking for. It aims to deliver eye - opening answers to questions asked by people all around the world.” How to start a business” or “How to plan a trip on a tight budget”. Those are the real-life concerns that can be best approached by people, who actually have experienced them before. Qoorio operates as a marketplace for sharing and buying knowledge. Money raised on the platform can be distributed by the user on a charity of the choice. Qoorio is led by a co-founder of Vinted - Justas Janauskas, a clothing marketplace, which has just became a new European tech unicorn. The question is … is Qoorio going to be another huge success for the founder?
Turbine AI
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Launch date: 2015
Funding Round: Seed $3.3M
Funding Source Atlantic Labs, Delin Ventures, O2h Ventures, Esther Dyson
Total funding received: $3.3M
Turbine.ai closed its first equity funding round of $3.3M led by Delin Ventures, an early stage Venture based in London. The round was followed on by angel investors specialising in the field of health-tech and will be allocated to the potential expansion of simulation - first drug discovery. Turbine.ai is a platform that enables the understanding of inner mechanism of cancer, and thus helps to discover the novel protein targets. Metaphorically saying, it “translates the available literature of cancer into a logical model of its cellular biology” which allows to uncover the mechanism of disease and target it effectively. The team behind the project consist of experienced AI specialists, biologists and data scientists, who have spent the past 10 years on developing the working model.
RoboSelf
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Launch date: 2019
Funding Round: Seed €200K
Funding Source Early Game Ventures
Total funding received: €200K
Another Romanian solution on the November funding list - RoboSelf is a robot assistant for SME, which allows to automate all the repetitive and time consuming desktop and web tasks. A roboself is characterised by 3 words: robotic - it is a software that can run all the repetitive actions an employee had to do befor; personal - always online and accessible when needed; assistant - a robot becoming a genuine assistant to the employee, performing the least interesting tasks without any error. All of that is possible thanks to the natural language processing technology developed by the startup’s team. RoboSelf is the sixth startup in the portfolio of an early stage romanian Venture Capital Early Game Ventures, investing in projects in the european emerging markets.
Frisbo
Location: Bod, Romania
Launch date: 2014
Funding Round: $1.2M
Funding Source Gapminder VC, Neogen, business angel
Total funding received: $2M
Frisbo’s product is a fullfilment platform offering storage, order processing, invoicing, packing, delivery and administration solutions for online sellers. The offer is adjusted to the customer’s needs with variable rates added to the fixed base price and depending on the the number of orders processed and the quantity of product delivered. So far the startup is operating in Romania, and in single cities of Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland. The recent $1.2M round was the highest of the 3 rounds raised in total by the romanian startup. As a result Frisbo has now a valuation of around €6M.
Trisbee
Location: Praque, Czech Republic
Launch date: 2017
Funding Round: Seed €240K
Funding Source Startup Wise Guys, business angels
Total funding received: €570K
Trisbee is a licensed payment solution for freelancers and offline business, which makes it simple for merchants to transfer money in just a few clicks. Up to the amount limit, the service is free. With trisbee app payment terminals are useless, as the only device needed to proceed with the transaction is a phone. The startup has already raised 5 funding rounds, and the recent €240K seed is the highest of them all.
These are the chosen 10 startups and scaleups from Central & Eastern Europe that successfully closed funding rounds in November 2019.
Related Posts:
10 TOP CEE Funding Rounds Closed In December 2019 (by Anna Kazmierczak, Analyst, Next Road Ventures)
10 TOP CEE Funding Rounds Closed In January 2020 (by Anna Kazmierczak, Analyst, Next Road Ventures)
10 TOP CEE Funding Rounds Closed In February 2020 (by Anna Kazmierczak, Analyst, Next Road Ventures)
