3 Trends In Entrepreneurship In Central and Eastern Europe

Our journey through Central and Eastern Europe on the quest to source the best entrepreneurs was akin cutting a cross-section through each country.

Witnessing the brightest and most determined minds, you come to understand the challenges the society is grappling with and learn what is driving and motivating entrepreneurs. It also reveals how well-equipped entrepreneurs are to execute and embrace the critical thinking and problem solving that are integral to navigating to success.

The major themes that emerged over the course of the year in this promising region were threefold:

• the proliferation of “bots” which will upend the way we compute
• the further interviewing of virtual reality and physical reality, and
• technology for structural change, solving broader societal issues like monitoring health, medical conditions, and food safety.

Let’s have a look at each one of them in more detail:

The Rise of the “Bots”

Today robots are affectionately called “bots.” Powered by artificial intelligence, bots allow users to perform daily tasks like checking the weather or booking flights via a messaging platform.

We’re heralding a new era of conversational interface. Where the computer screen and mouse have been the protocol for accessing computing power, chat bots make computing conversational.

The rapid advances in AI have converted what was once a Watson pipedream into commonplace technology. We are facing a future of computing that will be screen-less and mouse-less.

Mid 2016, we began to see the first wave of startups in CEE harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence in the form of “bots.” Since then, the news headlines have been buzzing.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared “Bots are the new apps”, Facebook will be launching a “bot store” to supersede the app store marketplace, and the Economist is calling bots “the next frontier.”

Bots promise not only to change the way we access computing, but the interface also opens a new realm of possibilities for the way companies engage with customers and the types of tasks that can be performed.

Their likeness to messaging apps lowers the bar to access customers, demonstrating some of the highest engagement and growth.

In some ways bots have manifested in the way we anticipated robots would: they accelerate production and replicate human labor. With their knack for quickly completing repetitive tasks, bots indeed fulfill a niche optimizing the workforce and eliminating redundant work.

Artificial Employee from Russia does exactly this with their mission to “free employees from routine tasks,” ostensibly derived from tedious excel work.

Bots have also materialized with incredible ingenuity, creating unforeseen utility.

Bazillion Beings from Armenia is a self-professed “independent online life form” that amalgamates all the best features of your existing phone apps to create new functions.

These “algorithmically generated mashups of public APIs and other micro-services create new services.” So if you are trying to plan an outing with friends, Bazillion Beings can draw from your contacts, restaurant booking app, weather app, and calendar, to find the most suitable date and preferred locale for the group gathering without hours of back-and-forth coordination.

Bazillion Beings also has a Darwinian twist, only the strongest bots survive, encouraging and rewarding the best developers and gamers to innovate.

Talkbank.io from Moscow is an AI chatbot for a virtual bank that eliminates the need for a physical banking branch. Mobile phone users can manage their money with a bot to pay, save, and transfer simply by opening a messaging app.

The barriers to banking are minimized, encouraging more spontaneous and more effective financial management without the laborious process of logging into banking portals or visiting physical sites.

The ramifications could be tremendous in emerging markets where large portions of the population are unbanked, and the costs of servicing low income customers with traditional banking services is too onerous.

MoneyFriend bot from Poland takes the ease of lending to whole new heights. MoneyFriend simultaneously tracks your facebook activity, texting, and banking accounts to advise and manage your personal finances.

The AI not only monitors but also predicts and anticipates your financial activity. The bot can caution and cushion big nights with quick cash to hold users over until the next paycheck.

It remains to be seen what the implications will be when getting a loan is as simple as texting “yes.”

2. VR & AR

While chatbots might one day make apps obsolete, entrepreneurs are also wrestling with how to laminate physical and digital realms. Once again, CEE startups prove that material innovation is critical not only in the composition of molecular structure, but in how materials are conceived as a conduit between realms via screens, physical armatures, and even scanners.

For example, Abyss Glass Group from Warsaw has produced an AI mirror that not only displays information with an embedded screen, but it is also highly intelligent taking cues and responding.

In the gym, the mirror’s sensors can post your vital statistics and in the bathroom it can correct the way you brush your teeth. Intelligent sensors can also detect feelings; when people look at mirrors they reveal feelings and expressions and this data can be coded and mined for consumer insights.

Gamers from Ukraine developed Raccoon, a glove for synchronizing the body in the virtual world and physical world. Raccoon wants to achieve full immersion into virtual reality by creating tactile perception for the hands, blurring seamlessly the physical and digital realms.

The Digital Showroom by Texel is another compelling example of the interlacing of the physical and digital. Texel was the first place winner at Seedstars Moscow in 2015 with their highly precise portable scanner.

They pitched their hardware with the premise that they could scan your body and immediately thereafter print a 3-D model figurine. Fast-forward six months later and they’ve made it a shopping mall attraction, where customers can get scanned and then receive clothing suggestions tailored to their body type.

The retailers build huge digital catalogues of body types to better approximate sizing and inventory but the real innovation comes from Digital Showroom’s ability to superimpose these 3-D body scans onto animations.

By mapping our bodies with millions of data points, they can project a 3-D scan onto an Olympian doing backflips or the main character of a movie. So not only will you have the possibility to feel bodily responses to a video game, in the near future you will be able to see yourself on the screen as a protagonist.

Imagine the engagement rates on social media when users recognize the leading character in the advertisement.

3. Solving Societal Ills

Outside of the fantastic world of screens and bots, CEE startups are also grappling with large scale problems like pollution, energy shortages, and drought that are critically impacting cities and states. Entrepreneurs are thus reacting to these large-scale issues typically reserved for government budgets.

BioSens from Ukraine was built on the premise that food safety is a critical issue, annually costing the governments billions of dollars. In response to that, they developed sensors that provide immediate results within twenty minutes on site as opposed to seven days in a lab. BioSens eliminates laboratories and personnel, providing rapid diagnostics for identifying and measuring aflatoxin B1 and aflotoxin A1 at the source.

Piroq from Kazakhstan addresses another global problem, this time aiming to improve the safety of roads by incentivizing drivers to practice safe driving. Their proprietary technology monitors and evaluates driving performance and rewards drivers with discounts from insurance companies.

Insurance companies gain more touch-points to evaluate driver performance and users are incentivized to lower their insurance by exhibiting good driving. The mobile application for behavior-based insurance could have broad implications for road safety.

Last, but not least, MindPax from Czech Republic is tackling a global healthcare predicament. Bipolar and schizophrenic disorder plague individuals the world over, afflicting 2% of the population. Both diseases are challenging to treat and result in hospitalization if treatment does not succeed, which is often burdensome and costly.

Mindpax has designed a Fitbit for psychiatry to empower bipolar and schizophrenia patients and their doctors, so they can manage their diagnosis and prevent relapses.

If startups are a prism for understanding the larger societal leanings in Central and Eastern Europe, its clear that impact of newfound technologies will touch on all facets of life from chores and recreation, to medical care and regulation.

Want to meet some of these changemakers? Then join us at the Seedstars Summit, and become part of an international dialogue about these topics!