CEE Tech News 008

A market as hot as the weather!

Summer has come, but the momentum within the region has not hit the beaches yet. Slovakian flying cars, Daimler’s continuous efforts to disrupt the taxi market and a number of other ‘outside’ investments are the highlights from all around the ecosystem since our last report.

• AdEx, a decentralized digital advertising exchange, out of Bulgaria recently closed an Initial Coin Offering for about USD 10M in an attempt to bring blockchain and digital marketing together.
• After Delivery Hero’s least to say successful debut on the Frankfurt stock exchange earlier in June, Lithuanian food delivery startup Foodout has now merged with Ukrainian EDA.UA with a plan to further expand within the Baltics and Eastern Europe. The merger was also followed by a 1 Million EUR investment from Chernovetskyi Investment group.
• Again from the restaurant and food service industry, free restaurant reservation SaaS business e-Table has raised 1 Million EUR from business angels and VentureFriends VC. Founded in 2014, e-Table has enabled more than 300,000 users to choose the right eating spot from over 1500 restaurants in Greece and Cyprus.
• Russian stress management app Welltory has raised $1 Million from private investors. The healthtech enterprise was founded at the beginning of last year and predominantly targets handling the stress load of workaholics. Welltory is also based in California and the newly infused capital will be used towards expansion on the US market.
• Deliver, a freight delivery platform also from Russia, has completed an $8 million seed investment round lead by Inventure Partners, alongside A&NN Group and Amereus Group. The capital will be used to promote Deliver’s scaling and expansion in Europe as it looks to take 15% of the total Russian freight market by 2020.
• American VC firm TCV, with portfolio companies such as Facebook and Airbnb, realized its first investment on the territory of Poland in Pracuj Group. Pracuj offers online HR and job recruitment SaaS in Central Europe and is considered to have a great international outlook, per TCV general partners John Doran and David Yuan.
• After the recent deal from February with Greek Taxibeat, Daimler continues to expand in the Eastern European taxi market through its acquisition of Romanian competitor Clever Taxi with a 600,000 userbase. Financials have not been disclosed.
• Following a successful funding round last month, Slovakian flying car developer AeroMobil has raised additional undisclosed capital from InfraPartners Management. With prices ranging between 1.2 and 1.5 Million EUR, AeroMobil’s product is expected to reach customers in the next few years. “Now that we have launched the next generation of the AeroMobil flying car we are 100% focused on getting the vehicle ready for testing this year and delivery to our first customers by 2020,” said CEO Juraj Vaculik.

Let us know if we missed any major news splash over the last couple of weeks and stay tuned for our upcoming pieces on Medium and Facebook!