CEE Tech News 002

The regional ecosystem looks to be gaining more and more traction!

A couple of exits in Romania, Google opening up an equity-free CEE startup program are just some of the newsworthy events that happened over the last few weeks in Central and Eastern Europe.

• Romanian cyber security provider CyberGhost is acquired by the Israeli Crossrider in a deal worth a total of 9.2 million as part of Crossrider’s B2C market reach improvement program.
• Leading Swiss video technology specialist Yoveo acquires Romanian editing automation software company iRewind which had previously raised about €1.5 of seed capital.
• Google announced the opening of its launchpad accelerator program in Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary. The 6-month equity-free training program focuses on late-stage startups which would receive mentorship, credits for Google Products, PR assistance and continuous support from Google and its network.
• The Bulgarian Government will allocate aproximately €55 million for seed/acceleration investment funds on a co-investment basis (Falling under the umbrella of the “Fund of Funds”, a vehicle managing various EU financial instruments.) The funds will be available for investment vehicles aiming to fund early-stage startups in all sectors excluding agriculture.
• dryTools, Serbian-based startup, completes merger with cloud software Silicon Valley-based Alchemy. dryTools provides development tools for high quality enterprise grade applications.
• Rimac Automobili, the Croatian company lead by Mate Rimac will provide the lightweight hybrid battery system for the AM-RB 001 — a $3M hypercar collaboration between Aston Martin and Red Bull, expected to arrive in 2018.
• MyTaxi, part of Daimler, acquired Greek taxi startup Taxibeat last month as part of its strategy to go head to head with Uber on the European market. The details of the deals are undisclosed, however the acquisition is expected to be around the €40M mark. Taxibeat had previously raised about €6M of capital, including a Series B led by Hummingbird Ventures.

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