RomanianStartups.com

The Romanian Internet Tech Startups Directory

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Talentbuddy.co was founded in 2013 in Vancouver, Canada by Octav Druta, Andrei Soare, and Vlad Berteanu to help developers prepare for technical interviews using a learn-by-doing approach. The lessons were specifically focused on Javascript technology. More than 45,000 developers were helped to improve their ability to solve problems, build applications, advance their careers, and get new jobs, said TalentBuddy.

talentbuddy-udemy-logo

As a result, Udemy acquired the young startup, for an undisclosed amount, and the Talentbuddy founders, Octav Druta and Andrei Soare, will join Udemy as employees. This is Udemy’s first acquisition.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Udemy is the world’s leading online learning marketplace where over 10 million students are enrolled in more than 40,000 courses in 190 countries.

TalentBuddy had Version One, Mike Edwards, BDC Capital and Highline as investors.

February 19, 2016 |

paua_ventures_logoBerlin based venture capital firm Paua Ventures has raised its debut institutional early stage fund (Paua I) with a first close of $45 million. The final close is expected to be $65 million. The firm had previously been bootstrapped with $2 million coming solely from the management team, starting in 2010. With the new institutional fund, Paua will continue to double down on European Seed and Series A opportunities in areas such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), B2B-marketplaces, B2C mobile, mobile enterprise solutions as well as ecommerce 2.0.

The new fund comes on top of a successful year for Paua, having completed two further exits and investments in category leaders such as Pipedrive and Lesara, where Paua has invested alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and Northzone Capital. External investors have to date followed on with investments of $55 million into the new Paua portfolio. From its previous portfolio Paua has now exited four out of eleven companies still holding shares in remaining five active ventures.

Team_Paua_Ventures

Paua I already has a portfolio of seven active companies and has deployed around $9 million in capital to date. Paua is aiming to invest into another 20 startups within the next three years. The fund typically writes its first check at Seed or Series A stage, investing amounts between $200.000 to $2 million – with the ability to follow up to a maximum of $6 million.
The new fund has a diverse limited partners base: institutional investors such as the European Investment Fund, high net worth individuals including several renowned entrepreneurs and major global industrial groups such as Klöckner & Co SE.

 
Performance
In its previous portfolio, Paua successfully invested in fast growing and profitable internet companies such as Amorelie (www.amorelie.de) or Flaconi (www.flaconi.de), both acquired by media company Pro7Sat1 and Producteev, (www.producteev.com), exited to Jive Software. The current venture portfolio includes the premium online discounter Lesara (www.lesara.com), as well as the US-Estonian Sales CRM software vendor Pipedrive (www.pipedrive.com) and the Munich-based CRM software company Shore (www.shore.com).

 

The firm plans also to tap into the Romanian market for fresh startups seeking funding. They will visit Romania soon.

December 16, 2015 |

Spherik Accelerator, which is an startup accelerator from the city of Cluj-Napoca (Romania), had its Demo Days on May 16. 11 presentations were made and over 100 participants attended at this first edition.
Spherik Accelerator is a rigorous 4-month program taking place in Cluj-Napoca that helps carefully selected teams of tech innovators develop and strengthen the necessary set of skills to develop a business.

Jennifer Austin, the coordinator of Spherik, shares her reflections about the Demo Days 2015.

But before that, please take a look at the team pitches.

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Demo Day 2015, Spherik’s inaugural Demo Day, marked an important milestone not only for our teams, but for Spherik. Bringing together more than 100 people, from business and tech executives, entrepreneurs, investors, community members, and more, the day was a testament to what is possible with hard work, dedication, and risk taking. I am especially proud of all our teams, who pitched their start-ups exceptionally well, and our mentors, who helped us come so far.

Jennifer-Austin-Spherik-accelerator-demo-days-2015

Jennifer Austin

But finally, a Demo Day is merely a milestone–a the time to bring together the people who have helped the teams get this far, as well as those who can help them go further. After Demo Day, things don’t end—we will be working hard to bring more opportunities to the teams. The teams are already right back to work preparing documents to send to regional and international players who could not come, but are eager to see what they’ve got.

The day was as much a celebration of our teams and our mentors as a statement about our vision for Spherik.

With thought-provoking presentations from Irina Albu, Executive Director of Tech Angels; Mary Andronic co-founder of Venture Connect; Dan Sturza from Friboburg Capital; and Leontin Toderici, COO of Banca Transilvania, we sought to provide value not just for our teams, but also for our mentors, supporters, and community. Each time a mentor comes to us, we want them to find value—by meeting eager and hardworking teams, meeting interesting people and networking, and by learning through teaching. This is what we want to create here—a community of value created by sharing not only hard work (and trust us, both the teams and mentors have been working hard) but also sharing opportunities and sharing success.

What does sharing success mean? It means focusing on what we can build together—which I believe is quite a lot. It means thinking about how you can share your opportunities and resources, rather than worrying that by doing so you will lose. It also means sharing the hard and grunt work.

Demo Day was a fantastic event showcasing the teams, complete with fancy wine and much applause. But the work leading up to it was often difficult, painful, and unglamorous. For a week in a row our teams, staff, and mentors didn’t leave Spherik before midnight—the record being 03:30. Over the course of the program the teams suffered blunt criticism, hard questions, and harsh assessments in order to grow and improve. We all know how hard it is to receive criticism—but what about giving it? It would have been easier for the mentors to give weak platitudes and praises to avoid the hard work of critical assessment and risk and pain that comes with upsetting people.

Read More…

May 25, 2015 |

Cluj-Napoca hosts between 6-9 June, for the second consecutive year, “Techsylvania“, the largest international event on the area of technology and innovation in the region.

The 2015 edition starts with a 24 hours hackathon (6th to 7th of June) that addresses a number of over 130 avid, eager to build applications in the field of wearable and connected devices and the internet of things programmers. These devices, the newest in the industry, will be made available to the participants through the partners of the event. At the end of the 24 hours programming marathon, following a session of presentations, 3 winning teams will be validated and will receive devices and invitations to present their product at startup accelerators as prizes.

The second part of the event is the Conference, which will take place on 8-9 June and the topics will revolve around three main themes: Code (the latest solutions and technical themes), Product (product management, marketing), Funding (financing methods and types of investments).

Who attends:
▪ Over 700 attendees from the IT, telecom and marketing field
▪ Top and Middle Management, as well as people with a strong technical background
▪ Decision makers, specialists in their fields, entrepreneurs and startups

What you will leave with:
▪ How will new technologies improve your company’s performance
▪ Learn how to build software products or how to fundraise
▪ New contacts to build sustainable relationships

Why you should be there:
▪ Learn from Top speakers, experts in their fields
▪ Find out the latest trends in the technology field

Agenda highlights:
▪ Cyber-security and the trends of tomorrow
▪ Hackathons on Rails
▪ Overview of trends in the China market
▪ Future of transportation

Some of the speakers:

techsylvania-2015-event-speakers

 

You can get your tickets here. Use the ‘RoStartupstech‘ code on the registration page and receive a 20% discount when registering for the hackathon or conference. The deadline for the regular ticket is 1st of June.
RomanianStartups.com is a partner of Techsylvania and they are part of our database too.

May 22, 2015 |

Romanian entrepreneurship has come of age. In recent months, companies founded by Romanians worldwide, using Silicon Valley as a launchpad for their ventures, have achieved major acquisitions, partnerships and financing.

On 8th of May 2015 The Honorary Consulate of Romania from San Francisco and The Romanian-American Business Network RABN from Silicon Valley, USA organized a discussion with globally successful Romanian entrepreneurs.

You can see the video below (1 hour, 23 minutes).

The presenters were:
RADU GEORGESCU – RAV (acquired by Microsoft), Avangate avangate.com (acquired by Francisco Partners), Vectorwatch vectorwatch.com, Coinzone coinzone.com, ePayment (acquired by Naspers)
ANDREI DUNCA – Liverail liverail.com (acquired by Facebook)
MIRCEA PASOI – Summify summify.com (acquired by Twitter)
RADU RUSU – Fyusion fyusion.com ( received major investment recently)
DIWAKER SINGH – RAV (acquired by Microsoft), Avangate avangate.com (acquired by Francisco Partners), Vectorwatch vectorwatch.com, Coinzone coinzone.com ,ePayment (acquired by Naspers)
CRISTIAN STRAT – Summify – summify.com (acquired by Twitter)

The event also had special guests:
CHRISTIAN CLAUS – German Accelerator Silicon Valley germanaccelerator.com
PAUL BARAN – Romanian American Foundation rafonline.org

The hosts of this event were Dana Beldiman – Honorary Consul General of Romania and George Roth – Honorary Consul of Romania and founder of Recognos.com. The hosts hope this kind of event will eventually become a regular one.

 

RomanianStartups.com was mentioned in the beginning by Dana Beldiman. Some statistics from the website was presented there and we understand that not the whole Romanian tech startups scene is on RomanianStartups.com, but we strive to bring as many as possible on-board.

You can help too, by making RomanianStartups.com more known (sharing, emailing, registering startups if you find they are not part of the database, let other founders know about the site). Thank you.

May 18, 2015 |

Session Three of ‘European Entrepreneurship’ course presents Radu Georgescu, based in Bucharest, will showcase their new Vector Watch that aims to challenge Apple’s leading position in wearables with its own proprietary operating system. Vector demonstrate the solid innovation potential in South-Eastern Europe, and the world-class abilities and global vision of leading entrepreneurs and founders from this emerging region.

This course “Europe & Silicon Valley – European Entrepreneurship & Innovation” is taught at Stanford by the professor Burton Lee with the help of assistants Burak Cetin and Gerald Brantner.

February 3, 2016 |

Brace yourselves! How to Web is coming and it’s going to be… LEGENDARY! Meet some of the best & brightest minds in the CEE & beyond, listen to hands-on talks & practical case studies, get to feel the vibe of the CEE startup ecosystem! All these & more on November 26 & 27 at the 6th edition of How to Web, the most important conference on tech innovation & entrepreneurship in South Eastern Europe. Are you the founder of an early-stage tech startup with disruptive potential at global scale? Then apply now for Startup Spotlight, competition & mentoring program with total cash prizes of USD 20.000!

Why attend?

How to Web Conference 2015 brings you at the same table with 1000+ startup founders, product managers, developers, online marketers & community leaders from all around the CEE. Beyond high-quality content, including case studies and hands-on talks on different topics, you have great networking opportunities by connecting with the who’s who in the regional tech industry.

Learn best practices from remarkable entrepreneurs & top-notch professionals

Successful entrepreneurs and experienced professionals from all around the world will take the main stage of How to Web Conference to share best practices & practical case studies, and deliver insightful talks on product launches, product metrics, product marketing, content marketing, conversion rate optimization through growth hacking, or team building and management, among many others.

Among the speakers that you’ll get to meet and learn from this year, there are:
Jan Reichelt, Co-Founder and President, Mendeley, a company that disrupted information sharing in scientific research, grew to 50 employees and a few million users, and was acquired by Reed Elsevier in April 2013;
Larry Gadea, Founder & CEO, Envoy, startup that allows businesses to check-in people and keep track of their visitors and that recently raised a USD 15 million series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz;
Martin Eriksson, Co-Founder, Mind the Product and Product Tank, entrepreneurial, driven and innovative product management professional with 18+ years experience in building leading online products;
Kalman Kemenczy, Director of Product, Prezi.com, a cloud-based (SaaS) presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting and sharing ideas on a virtual canvas;
Edial Dekker, Co-Founder, Gidsy & Hack de Overheid and ex-Senior Product Manager, Eventbrite;
Bram Kanstein, Founder, Startup Stash, a curated directory of 400 resources and tools for startups, that went viral and got 230.000 pageviews in 48 hours, and ex-European Community Manager, Product Hunt;
Sujan Patel, Renowned growth hacker, marketer, and serial entrepreneur, Co-Founder of ContentMarketer.io and author of ”100 Days of Growth”, ebook sold in over 10,000 copies.

And many many more! Check out the list of speakers confirmed on the conference website.

how-to-web-2015-speakers

Read More…

October 26, 2015 |

For the third consecutive year, Business Review (the premier Romanian business publication in English language) organizes “SME’s HOW TO” (small-medium enterprises), event dedicated to the SMEs, which brings to the foreground the latest and most relevant business information, case studies, practical solutions for managers, entrepreneurs and investors. This year’s edition will be held on May 28, at Impact Hub, Bucharest.

Startups and tech startups are in the SME category.

Starting with marketing, branding and technology and their importance in business development, moving afterwards towards HR strategies and optimal construction and management of a well-knit, motivated and enthusiastic team, alongside which a business is able to grow in a healthy manner, and reaching a pinnacle with success stories that brought color and benefits to the community and to the Romanian economy – SMEs How To offers a thorough toolkit for business development.

SMEs-how-to-2015-business-review

Business financing options and modalities, the solutions in accessing European funds or government scholarship, the schemes open to SMEs and what managers should know about submitting the applications will be extensively discussed topics at the conference, and the directions and solutions will come from speakers who have built up successful businesses and who built the future of many other startups and initiatives.

Among them there are: Mihai Sfintescu – Partner with 3TS Capital Partners, Dragos Rosca – Chairman and Shareholder with Delta Asset Invest, More Outsourcing, RBL, Raluca Nan – Project Officer EBRD, Marcin Wojcicki – Business Development Manager, BVB, Marius Bostan, Founder and Senior Partner of VMB Partners SA, Chairman and Founding Member of the National Foundation of Young Managers.

What are the current challenges and the main legal and taxation aspects of interest to SMEs will be debated by Attorney Luisiana Dobrinescu, Dobrinescu Dobrev SCA and Ana Maria Andronic, Partner at Biris Goran SPARL.

Wargha Enayati, founder of REGINA MARIA Private Health Network, who completed one of the largest transactions on the private medical services market in Romania, will discuss about how to successfully sell your business. Wargha Enayati also set up the basis of Regina Maria Foundation, which, at the end of this month, will open the second social clinic.

On entrepreneurship and business vision will speak Sergiu Negut, Owner SVP Consult, Associate Partner Frufru, Softelligence Romania, HART Consulting Romania, 2Parale and about the successful marketing and branding of our times will discuss Andrei Cohn, Managing Director Cohn & Jansen.

The event’s program is structured on several tracks dedicated to the main lines of action and business development, such as: marketing, technology, tax & law, financing options, HR and sessions dedicated to the keynote speakers.

The panel discussions and presentations will also include case studies and success stories experienced and told by entrepreneurs with related know-how.

The event organized by Business Review will take place on May 28, at Impact Hub, 8.30 to 17.00.

All those interested in participating to SME’s How To can register online by completing the registration form, by phone – 031 040 09 31 or via email – events@business-review.ro.

Micro-enterprises benefit from a special fare.
More details about the event, the modalities of participation, the full program and speakers at http://business-review.eu/br-events/smes-how-to-2015.

RomanianStartups.com has partnered with this event and hopefully startups will get useful information by participating there.

May 24, 2015 |

JSCamp Romania is the place where you will find smart and friendly people from across the field of front-end development, to bring you up to speed on the latest open-web technologies.

The event, held on June 3 at Radisson Blu Hotel, Bucharest, is also a great opportunity to network with your peers, to share experiences and at the end of the day, to party with them. Kick back with speakers and attendees after the conference with a refreshing lager or wine.

They also lined up a series of speakers which you can see below.

Awesome Speakers

jscamp-event-bucharest-2015-speakers

You can get your tickets here.

RomanianStartups.com is a partner of JSCamp as we have this event in our database as well.

May 22, 2015 |

MVP Academy is a satellite-program of How To Web tech conference from Bucharest, Romania.
For 7 weeks, the academy will take the selected applications out of their comfort zone and bring them into the startup world at TechHub Bucharest. It’s here where the applicants will build valuable connections to help take their products to the next level and get loads of learning and work done.

MVP-Academy-How-to-Web

Most of the finalists this year have founded other companies before (either failed startups or service companies), or have in their teams tech professionals with a proven record and valuable expertise.

 

Let’s meet them!

1) Accelerole: pay-as-you-go management software that helps freelancers and agencies master the bill-by-the-hour structure & better manage their internal processes;
2) Catwalk15: mobile app that helps you get instant fashion advice and find style inspiration;
3) Clepsisoft CyberFog: proactive cybersecurity solution which can deflect cyberattacks targeting your company;
4) CloudHero: management and reporting product that empowers teams and individuals to manage their infrastructure, deploy new services and control the costs from one single place;
5) Conversion Network: integrated marketing software that enables affiliate marketers to build and scale their business with less effort and better results;
6) InnerTrends: web analytics solution for web apps and ecommerce websites focused on tracking customers;
7) MyDog.xyz: platform that interconnects dog owners, dog service providers and parks;
8) SafeDrive: mobile app that improves the traffic safety by rewarding the users that don’t use the phone while driving with points that can be converted in products and services;
9) Seeds: unified survey platform for heavy data gatherers;
10) Squady: platform that helps people discover, join and create social activities in an easy and intuitive way;
11) Swapr: easy to use mobile app that allows women to exchange clothes with each other anytime, anywhere;
12) SwipeTapSell: single-page browser-based app that offers a streamlined mobile and tablet experience, helping online stores to engage and convert more;
13) Unloq: a new way to authenticate and authorize transactions that replaces passwords with devices, thus offering its users increased security, simple & free.

 

The finalists will also have the opportunities of building valuable connections in the industry by working with experienced mentors & professionals such as Jon Bradford (Managing Director, Techstars UK), Mike Butcher (Senior Editor, TechCrunch Europe), Alex Barrera (Co-Founder, Tech.eu & Press42), Ivan Brezak Brkan (Editor, Netokracija), Olaf Lausen (Chief of CEO Staff & Business Development Director, Telekom Romania) or Florin Talpeș (CEO & Founder, Bitdefender).

Throughout the program, the finalists will discuss with angel investors, early stage investment funds that are active in the region (Early Bird, 3TS Capital Partners) and with representatives of worldwide known accelerators such as Techstars, Startupbootcamp, Startup Wiseguys, Ignite 100 or LAUNCHub.

Everything will wrap up with the Demo Day, which will take place on May 14th.

RomanianStartups.com partnered with MVP Academy and How To Web in making the Romanian startup scene more known inside and outside Romania.

March 20, 2015 |

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