LAUNCHub, Bulgarian Seed Fund, Starts the New Year With 9 New Portfolio Companies
Mia Biberović
6. 1. 2014.
The Bulgarian LAUNCHub Seed Fund marks the beginning of the year with 10 new investments – 9 new companies and one follow-on in portfolio member EdHub. The latest investment decision followed the fourth Long Weekend Event held during November 28 – December 1, 2013, which was the culmination point of the Fund’s selection process. During four days of intensive pitching, coaching and mentoring, 14 teams competed to receive seed investment funding of up to 200K Euro.
The Bulgarian LAUNCHub Seed Fund marks the beginning of the year with 10 new investments – 9 new companies and one follow-on in portfolio member EdHub. The latest investment decision followed the fourth Long Weekend Event held during November 28 – December 1, 2013, which was the culmination point of the Fund’s selection process. During four days of intensive pitching, coaching and mentoring, 14 teams competed to receive seed investment funding of up to 200K Euro.
With the new 9 teams on board, LAUNCHub’s portfolio increases to 35 companies in 7 countries in Southeastern Europe – Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Croatia, Greece, and now stepping in in Slovenia and Ukraine with the latest investments. Since mid-2012 LAUNCHub has invested approximately 2.8 million Euros in the digital tech sector in the SEE region.
Stephane Gantchev, Partner at LAUNCHub says more about the investment decision:
We are definitely facing a booming startup culture in the entire SEE region that is now becoming quite exciting for investors. In our latest selection process, most of the teams we met were more mature, with proved traction, in some cases even with initial sales and revenues, having gained customer feedback and showing good knowledge of markets and trends. Pitching skills are getting better too.
The teams
- Appticles allows to mobilize web content, creating great user experience. The platform targets publishers and is based on the Open Web concept & HTML5.
- Greenpie provides a cloud-based solution for nutritionists that automates nutrition counseling processes and connects nutritionists to their clients in real time.
- Prefer.ly facilitatessocial decision-making.by extracting online reviews for different products and transforming them into purchase decision advice.
- WPToolbox is a marketplace for wordpress add-ons and pack of tools for bloggers and webmasters, including a unique platform for WP installation packs.
- Equafy provides a multi-browser automated testing tool and service. The IaaS/SaaS solution allows for tests to be run on any browser and for automatic bug identification and analysis.
- Mediatelyisa drug information mobile app and web application, which makes drug information easily available to doctors.
- IQFriends is a social brain training games on mobile that people can play and thus train their brain in a fun and social way.
- GameMatchis a mobile game discovery platform that helps players discover great games and developers find their target audience.
- BGMENU is an online platform for food ordering and delivery including over 250 restaurants in Bulgaria, which increase in number every day.
