Don’t Look, But Czech Startups Just Rocked The Stage at Wayra CEE

Global accelerator Wayra held a demo day yesterday in the youngest of its fourteen academies, based in Prague. Eight startups about to graduate from the eight month program this February had the chance to present themselves, their work and their quite impressive products and achievements to invenstors and media.

“Wayra” actually means means „wind“, so it is quite an appropriate name for an accelerator with academies in 12 different countries, with 318 startups under its wing and 12,6 million euros seed of investments.

The event was opened by Jarmila Placha, the Director of Wayra CEE and the director of Wayra Glocal Gonzalo Martin Villa. This is the first cohort of Prague startups who joined the global Wayra network and judging by their pitches, they will do well in the world.

WOPPA

There is a huge gap between how generations and corporations think and WOPPA is aimed at bridging that gap, Andrea Krajačovičova Cofounder and CEO of WOPPA explained, and their goal is to bridge it. This startap aims to help companies present themselves to a young audience in an attractive way and connect young talents with the companies looking for precisely the same.

They offer tailor made opportunities for students, including webinars, carreer counseling, job postings, online language courses and more. For companies, they  provide different packages that allow them to post jobs but also present their companies and teams through various types of posts and articles.

Their placement rate is 80 percent at this point, they are already colaborating with 70 companies and have great plans of spreading their services to Germany and Poland as well as the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Remote Assistant

Remote Assistant is quite a socially aware startup trying to solve one simple yet prominent problem: the fact that everything is created for people with sight. Through their mobile app, Remote Assistant wants to use the smartphones, their cameras, voice and real-time location to connect visually imapaired with friends or professional assistance service.

They are allowing blind people to „use“ the eyes of their friends vicariously, through their smartphone camera. Tomaš Stanik got the idea from his blind friend at the university, who said that there are a lot of apps but the best help is a friend by your side, which is what this startup is trying to achieve.

The app connects the person with a friend or an assistant available 24/7, making them by your side through your smartphone. In partnership with  Czech Blind United they are launching the assistance service on June 2014, making Czech Republic the first country in the world.

Networker

This is a real-time mobile platform anda n analytics tool for business, combining LinkedIn dana with geo-location, as its CEO and cofounder Tomaš Banik explains it. The idea behind it is to facilitate networking by providing the users with tailored recommendations of possible connections, sorted by relevance.

Networker is aimed at private users and event organizers alike, whereas the latter are the ones who buy special packages to boost attendance and avoid cancellation and decline in sponsorship opportunities.

Big Launcher

This interesting startup has been downloaded more than 16 thousand times through Play Store. This app replaces the standard interface with a simpler, more easily readable one, bringing smartphones to seniors and visually challanged, people who have troubles recognizing tiny icons and finding their way through the crowded interfaces.

They are doing a swell job at that, but are also working on building an ecosystem of apps with interfaces customized in this way. Along with selling the app directly to customers, they also plan to focus on the B2B aspect, says co-founder Jan Husak, offering pre-installation to phone makers and telecoms.

LionExpo

This startup is focusing on technology for exhibition organizers- a mobile app and a web portal helping trade show organizer maximize their return on investments by creating a mirror image of a particular trade show online, so anyone can check the show out or contact the exhibitors before or after the event.

LionExpo also provides a set of tools for event organizers and gathers data which offers valuable real time feedback. The info attained this way is also used to create meaningful and lasting connections between attendees and exhibitors based on their profile information and activity.

TrashOut

This startup has two business streams: The TrashOut App and Venzeo. The former is a mobile solution used to report and monitor illegal dumps all over the world, and mind you, there are 300 million tons of illegally dumped trash worldwide. It is simple, easy to use and tackling a huge problem in over 70 countries. They have also been featured on television  for the many cleaning actions they inspired.

Venzeo, on the other hand, is a realt time platform for reporting issues in the field, created for garbage truck drivers. The drivers  can instantly report an issue preventing them from doing their job, and this information pops up on the screen of office operators so that the problem can be solved and time and money saved.

Basically they are taking the knowledge from Trash Out and bringing it to the Industry of waste management.

Mapilary

Online shopping is growing rapidly, but it can grow even faster if the customers are provided with a good service. Mapilary wants to do just that by maximizing the transparency in logistics and tracking goods on a map.

There are three main tools: Mapiary Tracker is a mobile app  showing driver’s real time position as well as the estimated time of delivery, which enables the end user to change the time and place of the delivery.

Mapilary Courier and Mapiary Dispatcher are on the other hand aimed at logistics companies which include a route planner, a communication tool, drivers and dispatch monitoring and an automated task managers.Their break point is recruiting 17 000 drivers and customers.

Datamolino

The last startup to present itself was Datamoulino, a slovakian startup, actually, and they had some big news to break: just the day before Slovak Innovations andTechnologies Fund invested 500 000 euros in seed funding into this company which is trying to make accountants’ lives a bit easier  What they are basically doing is automating their invoice process via an affordable and simple to use solution aimed at small and medium sized businesses,

They are combining optical character recognition and custom made AI to do this with the smallest error margin possible, and quite efficiently.

Datamoulino is trying to create a paperless accountant’s offices, eliminate manual entry of data and save costs of invoice processing. What it does is turn the thousands of invoices and receipts into a searchable online archive. They have also created a QR based system already used by banks throughout Slovakia, claimed CEO Andrej Glezl,  and are bound to do much more.

The Czech startup scene took us by surprise, starting with out of the box ideas, well prepared pitches, enthusiasm and last but not least with the results they presented. It is definitely a scene to keep an eye on.

Thanks for reading our special series on the Czech startup scene and startups, supported by one of its own – our good friends at Socialbakers! This series of articles will discover what’s happening in Prague and the rest of the country, from the accelerator Wayra to the latest examples of a new generation of tech companies – Netocratic will give you all the details of one of the Central and Eastern Europe’s most intriguing startup capitals!