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👋🏻 Hi All! Great to have you back after a long hiatus. Please note, as of today, “Budapest Letters” turns into visegrad.now, my newsletter covering startup and small business stories from the Visegrad countries (🇵🇱, 🇨🇿, 🇸🇰, 🇭🇺). New name and slightly new structure but I sure hope that you will enjoy the end product just as much as you did with the last!
Still, I am always open to new ideas and suggestions that could make this newsletter better, so DM me at hello.visegradnow@gmail.com, anytime. Also, if you like what you read, subscribe + share with people who are as fascinated with Visegrad as we are 😉
Cheers, Aron
📢 TL;DR
Top stories this week: ✍🏻 While 2023 was not exactly a great year for Czech and Hungarian startups, there were still some that managed to deliver success ✍🏻 Genomtec (🇵🇱), Digitoo (🇨🇿), Quesma (🇵🇱) and Dataddo (🇨🇿) have all received 💰 ✍🏻 Czechia’s Nekrachni aims to help young adults better manage their finances
🚨 Intro
Before we jump into the good stuff, here is a quick summary of what each new / re-vised section will talk about: 1) Intro will bring you 1 or 2 topics that interested me the most in the past 2 weeks; 2) Funding corner will show you the startups that got fresh funding and from whom; 3) In focus will introduce a specific startup that I find interesting: origins, key people, USP; 4) Role play will show you the startups that are hiring just now within the Visegrad ecosytem; and 5) Outro will list some good reads and tweets (or Xees?) that you might check.
And now...
In this weeks “Intro” I brought you two interesting startup lists that gave me good vibes for the start of the new year. The first one, from CzechCrunch (here), provides a great snapshot re: what has happened in 🇨🇿 startupland in ‘23.
In brief, the biggest funding rounds were realized by Keboola (ca. €30M, Series A), IP Fabric (ca. €23M, Series B) and Woltair (€20.5M, Series B), while the biggest exists came from the founder(s) of Manta (> €120M exit by Tomáš Krátký), Smartlook (> €80M each by Petr Janošík & Ondřej Machek) and Shoptet (> €40M by Miroslav Uďan) with Pavla Bobošíková (> €8M exit via WFHomie) and Vanda Seidelová (> €2M exit via Twigsee) as (well deserved) honorable mentions 👏🏻
Sure, year-on-year drop in total attracted funding looks bad (-75% vs 2022), as well as the percentage of female founders receiving funding per total (8%). But let us watch it as a glass half full, since it could have been worse… much worse…
The second, from the Hungarian version of Forbes (here), the US busines magazine, listed the most 🔥 local startups in 2023. According to the authors, the methodology, on the one hand, came from points that were based on analysing 5 key attributes: disruption, scaling, global presence, uniqueness of know-how and quality of investors. On the other hand, it came from points provided by a jury, consisting of both Forbes journalist (e.g. Ágnes Gólya, Gergő Zsiborás) and local / regional startup people (e.g. Csongor Biás - Startup Hungary, Enis Hulli - 500 Emerging Europe). Based on these, the 🇭🇺 Top 5 last year were as follows:
SEON (online fraud prevention)
Bitrise (mobile DevOps platform)
Turbine AI (simulation-driven drug discovery company)
Scipher Medicine (precision immunology company)
Craft (document management company)
Great achievements, especially in light of the fact that the Hungarian ecosystem seems to be less productive than its most relevant Visegrad counterparts (🇵🇱, 🇨🇿).
PS: Although it is a shame, and a rather big one, that there were no startups in the list that had at least 1 female founder / co-founder. Nill. None. Not cool.
💶 Funding corner
👏🏻 Genomtec, a medtech startup from 🇵🇱, bagged €5M from the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development; not your average funding source in this VC driven day and age, but hey, good for them. The fresh financing will aim at a specific, oncology-related project of the company that, by the way, specializes in genetic diagnostics.
Founded: 2016; HQ: Wroclaw; Founder(s): Miron Tokarski, Małgorzata Małodobra-Mazur, Henryk Roguszczak; Total funding (until today): N/A
👏🏻 Digitoo, a fintech startup from 🇨🇿, nabbed €2.3M led by Reflex Capital, a local VC firm. The company, that provides an AI-assisted bookeeping platform for companies and their accountants, will use the investment to fuel its growth.
Founded: 2019; HQ: Prague; Founder(s): Karin Fuentesová; Total funding: €3-5M range (exclusively from local sources, incl. Nation 1 and Kaya).
👏🏻 Quesma, a B2B SaaS startup from 🇵🇱, landed ca. €2.1M, co-lead by Heartcore Capital (🇩🇰) and Inovo, a well known local VC firm. The financing will aim at further developing its product and growing its existing core team.
Founded: 2023; HQ: Warsaw; Founder(s): Jacek Migdał, Paweł Brzoska; Total funding: ca. €2.1M
👏🏻 Dataddo, a data startup from 🇨🇿, received ca. €1.3M from Impulse Ventures, the VC firm of one of the richest persons in Czechia, Ondřej Tomek. The company, that operates a cutting-edge data integration platform, will use the investment to boost its marketing and sales efforts in the US and South America (e.g. Brazil).
Founded: 2015; HQ: Prague; Founder(s): Zdeněk Pecha, Petr Nemeth, Joel Thom; Total funding: ca. 6.5M
🥂 to all founders and teams on the fresh raises!
🔍 In focus
This week’s “In focus” is on Nekrachni, a fintech startup from 🇨🇿 that is helping young adults (i.e. 15-22 year olds, typically) better manage their finances. The startup was officially launched in 2021 by Jakub Rychlý and Maria Šimůnková, but it started out earlier as a non profit project by the two, back then, high schoolers.
The success of the company, that operates an app with simple, easy to understand and useful financial literacy content (e.g. how to start a budget), relies mostly on the power TikTok, the main channel for it to promote financial know-how.
Nekrachni’s popularity is so strong and its core solution great that after many local accolades (meaning various small grants from public and private institutions) it was recently awarded ca. €600k by Google.org, the philantropic of arm of the US tech giant. An amount that will accelerate the growth of the startup or, as Maria noted in comment to CzechCrunch per the award, “this will be a game changer for us“.
🤞🏻
💘 Role play
Keboola has 10 open positions right now, e.g. Product Owner in Prague;
SEON has 16 open positions in Budapest, London, Berlin and Austin;
Bitrise has 3 open positions, e.g. Product Designer in Budapest;
Nekrachni has 4 open positions, e.g. Financial Content Creator.
📚 Outro
Here is a list of good reads / links that you might find interesting:
State of European Tech 2023, a report by VC firm Atomico;
State of AI in Central and Eastern Europe, a report from The Recursive;
CEEfarers, a monthly newsletter (!subscribe!) from Czech VC firm Kaya.
And that is it folks, thanks for tuning in and…