28 accelerated startups, more than 1 million USD in seed investments & 13 products launched on the global market. These are, in a nutshell, the results of the first 2 editions of MVP Academy, their accelerator program. Tech founder working on a product with global potential? Apply by March 31st and you can be part of the MVP Academy batch of 2016!

When and where?

April 11th – May 31st @ TechHub Bucharest

What’s in it for you?

– Know-how: workshops and crash courses in customer development, product, growth hacking, investment, legal & more;
– Lead generation: Mentoring, on-demand meetings, and access to an international network of 400 mentors & 700+ startups;
– Pitching: Lots of presentations & pitch practice sessions to help you fine tune your pitch;
– Seed investment opportunities: Some of the best teams in the 2016 batch can raise an average of 50k EUR in exchange for a minority stake in the company from MVP Angels, the angel investors network associated with the program;
– Ongoing support: Throughout the program you’ll attend 1 on 1 coaching sessions with a hands-on approach to help you build your business and product strategy.

Criterias

The team is looking for tech startups that think big and have the capacity to execute and learn fast. There are a couple of eligibility criteria you should comply with in order to make the most out of the program:
– You are an early-stage tech startup in its first 2 years of activity;
– You are committed to building your product;
– You have at least a working prototype to show us;
– You have not raised more than 50k in funding for the current product;
– You have no prior acceleration experience with the product you’re currently working on.

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Berlin 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.

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.

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

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.

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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:

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.

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.