Remember the MVP Academy organized by Romanian How to Web? It is a pre-acceleration program for CEE early stage tech startups and it ended on Tuesday with a Demo Day. The finalists worked hard on their products for the last two months and pitched their products last night in front of the audience. In the same time, they have already started discussions for raising follow-up funding or being admitted into a European acceleration program.
Ready for some summer startup conferencing? RockPaperStartups, the best summer startup conference in Eastern Europe, is back! Meet all the startupers, geeks, designers, developers and investors at this unique event that falls between something of a conference, a workshop and large meetup. Location: Rijeka, Adriatic coast, Croatia. Date: July 17th and 18th (+20th – WhoHack mini hackathon).
A group of entrepreneurs and investors gathered around Slovenian Silicon Gardens startup initiative launched Silicon Gardens Fund – a micro fund focused on investing in early stage startups coming from Slovenia and the broader region. The Fund’s main investors are entrepreneurs from the region. Also joining are established U.S. investors who believe in the potential of the region - Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Jerry Colonna and Paul Vidich.
Portuguese non-profit organization Startup Pirates, announced yesterday that it's currently working with startup communities in 17 countries across 4 different continents. It also announced that it's expanding to Central Easter Europe with events already scheduled for Slovenia, Romania, Macedonia and Greece.
So I think I figured out the next Facebook and even have an idea where to look for investors. But how do I figure out how much money should I raise and what valuation should I strive for?
Here are the good news: you don’t have to go to the Silicon Valley to get funded. Not even London or Berlin. There is plenty of capital to be found in the CEE. You just have to know where to look. And the bad news: if you know where to look, and still can’t get funding that means your current idea/startup is just not good enough. And if you can’t raise funds in the CEE, the odds are very high you won’t in Berlin or London either. It is better to fail fast and move on to something new.
This is an introductory post to a mini series that analyzes the startup investment cycle: while this first post discusses what the cycle looks like in mature markets such as the Silicon Valley, the next post will analyze specifics of the cycle in the CEE region. Subsequent pieces will dig deeper into each phase and its CEE players, starting with Credo Ventures and the seed/venture investments.
After the great success of the first two GIC competitions in the CEE region, applications are now open for GIC 2014. Applicants are invited from Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Applicants should submit their projects aiming to improve the lives of at least one million people in Central Eastern Europe leveraging the power of accelerating technologies.
I’m no engineer, but here’s what I do remember from the physics classes that I didn’t manage to skip at school: Current only flows through a closed circuit. In business, always happy to adopt awkward pseudo-scientific analogies, we like to talk about full cycles. Or iterations.
Croatian consulting company DC&T, specializing in creative, efficient, and humane office space design, is setting out to conquer the world markets. First step: Dubai.
