We fund startups with up to €100k in financing plus acceleration support, including strong support on product, development, strategy, go-to-market, pitching, and more. Our founding team has strong experience in entrepreneurship, building both global and regional products for different markets. We have helped startups go from idea to funding, scaling, and exit. We also support teams with coworking space, regular networking events with investors and mentors, and connections to mentors and investors abroad.

To select the companies in which it will invest, Risky Business has launched an acceleration program hosted by Cluj Business Center. The program will culminate with a Demo Day at Techsylvania, one of the most important tech conferences in Romania.

Mentoring
We offer access to mentoring by our internal experts from development, sales, marketing, customer support and administration.
Investment
We give the chosen startup up to €25.000 investment – based on the number of founders and the needs – in return for a stake in the company.
Accomodation
We also provide office space located in the vibrant center of Bucharest, with its existing and fully equipped infrastructure.
Relocate?
If your team is not in the European Union, you can relocate any time to Bucharest and even stay during the program in our guesthouse, also located in the center of the city.
Access to Our API
We provide access to our API and our market with more than 5 million potential customers for privacy related products.

What We Are Looking For?

Basically we are interested in products and services that are designed to enable secure, encrypted communications, private browsing and secure file-sharing. Here is a list of some areas we’re particularly interested in. But you shouldn’t start a project just because it’s on our list. The list is fare away from being complete. The list is just here to help stimulate you to think about ideas. Remember: Most good ideas should be ones that surprise us, not ones we’re waiting for.

Passwords and online accounts
Anonymity
Non-consensual tracking in the Internet of Things (IoT) era
Decentralized Cloud Storage

Mission: We Reboot the Internet!
We believe in privacy as a basic human right. We believe in people. We build software infrastructures to protect the good guys against the bad guys. We are part of an industry that builds new user-oriented crypto-technology for the future.

The internet was created as an environment where everybody could express their opinion and have unrestricted access to information while remaining anonymous. And we believe it should stay that way!
Privacy matters and here at CyberGhost, we really take it seriously. We offer “Privacy as a Service (PaaS)” and we have costumers who are willing to pay for our service.

And we are glad that more and more people seem to embrace the well-known motto: “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product”.

We invest, mentor and support teams or companies that work on privacy related business models.

— Robert Knapp, CyberGhost CEO

The First NO-Silicon Valley Accelerator
We think that company headquarters like ours in the European Union is a very good solution for users regarding privacy: It offers a high legal standard in private data protection for the user and a possibility to operate absolutely transparent. We believe that US Lavabit owner Ladar Levison was right when he said, after he shut down is encrypted e-mail service:

“I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
— Ladar Levison, US Lavabit owner

We believe that a registered office in the European Union is a competitive advantage for privacy related businesses. First time in the history of internet businesses, European companies have an advantage towards US companies: They don’t get a “National Security Letter” and are not forced to violate their users’ privacy.

We believe that we can build sustainable privacy related businesses from the European Union and therefore we will invest, mentor and support teams or companies with head offices in the European Union.

We value and take into consideration the idea, the domain expertise, the time & money invested prior by the founders. Our aim is to step in the role of a tech co-founder, with equity varying on the effort involved and milestones set. Besides this, initially or in a later on, we can provide seed funding for additional equity.

Our aim is to build a community of web entrepreneurs and developers interested in social innovation and applications that can have a positive impact on society. For this we train underprivileged smart people on web development and help them to build web startups by offering them coaching & mentorship, technical support and access to funding.

Our incubator is a kick start for high-potential people who are especially interested in solving real problems.
We are looking for ideas and projects based on social innovation and technology.

We help future tech entrepreneurs to:
– pitch their ideas
– use the business canvas and make a benchmarking
– bootstrap and build a lean startup
– build a website or a landing page
– make a business plan
– find a team
– set up a company
– get funded

Innovation Labs starts on the 1st of March with the main areas of focus:

Internet of Things (ex: smart home, wearable devices, robots)
Big Data (ex: profiling, digital marketing, analytics, data visualization)
Digital Life (ex: social responsibility, medical)
The program is being deployed between March 2014 and May 2014, in 2 location – Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca.

It starts with a 24-hours hackathon where participants form teams and build MVPs. The best projects are selected into the pre-acceleration program and they receive mentorship and support from industry experts, entrepreneurs and tech experts. The program ends with a Demo Day where the teams pitch their products in front of investors. Innovation Labs 2.0 is a program organized by TechLounge powered by Orange and Microsoft YouthSpark.

More details about the program on the website http://2014.innovationlabs.ro/program/

The Spherik approach maximizes the probability of a startup’s success by providing the resources needed for the product, the market and the capital to harmoniously blend. We boost the companies’ access to know-how by providing education, mentorship and ambassadorship. Our approach includes post-acceleration support in order to refine the business past the acceleration phase.