CEE Tech News 009

Samsung, Uber getting involved as well!

The ecosystem is still as vibrant as headlines from all around the region form up our latest report on CEE exits and funding rounds.

· Greek text-to-speech and voice recognition developer Innoetics has been acquired by Samsung. Although financials have not been disclosed, Innoetics released information that the deal’s worth is the highest exit for a startup coming from a Greek academic and research center (the Athena Research & Innovation Center in Athens).

· After the stepdown of CEO Travis Kalanick, Uber recently announced a partnership with Yandex, the biggest Russian search engine and mother company of ride-hailing service Yandex.Taxi. The two companies will combine their businesses in Russia and Eastern Europe and will invest $225M and $100M respectively to complete the joint venture.

· Repsly, a Croatian B2B SaaS startup has raised $1.6M in seed funding, lead by top US angel investors Launchpad Venture Group. Developing mobile CRM and workforce tracking systems for field teams, Repsly operates in more than 70 countries and already serves more than 1000 customers, such as L’Oreal, KIA Motors, Philips, Nike Golf and others.

· Russian private equity firm Finstar announced its plans to invest up to $150M in Seed and Series A funding by 2022, targeting fintech startups from Europe, Latin America and South/Southeast Asia.

· South Central Ventures completed a 560,000 EUR, local tech record investment in Macedonian InPlayer. The capital will be used to expand the company’s Skopje-based team and facilitate its efforts to make a name for itself in the global video and digital asset monetization platform market.

· The Unarchiver, a suite of file extraction apps from Finland has been acquired by Ukrainian macOS software developer MacPaw. The deal was made with the goal of The Unarchiver’s continuation or in the words of the main man behind the idea, Dag Ågren : “I have felt bad about not maintaining and updating them properly. Therefore, I felt it is time to hand the flag over to someone else who can take care of them properly, and make sure they stay around for a long time still.”

· Adtech business Zemanta from Slovenia has made an exit to US content discovery platform Outbrain following previous successful $8M funding with the involvement of Union Square Ventures, Eden Ventures and Seedcamp. Following the acquisition, Zemanta will continue to operate as a standalone company, now serving as Outbrain’s first remote development center.

· Techstars London Accelerator and LAUNCHub Ventures have teamed up to provide ‘the Google for clinical trials’ FindMeCure with a $420,000 Seed investment at a $3M pre-money evaluation. Based in Bulgaria, FindMeCure helps patients find easy access to the right clinical trial from a database covering 95% of all trials worldwide in a potential life-saving initiative.

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!