Budapest Letters #37
👋 Hi All! Great to have you back. This is Budapest Letters, my newsletter covering startup and small business stories from the CEE region, or interesting developments that might have something to do with this part of Europe. Hope you will enjoy it!
Before we jump into edition #37, big shout out to our new subscribers, good to have you here. And one more thing before we roll, if you like what you read, subscribe + share 🙏
Cheers, Aron
📢 TL;DR
Top stories this week: ✍️ Mews, a Czech startup, is on an acquisition spree and eyes unicorn status ✍️ Payhawk, Tenderly and Bware Labs raised 💵 ✍️ Poland’s Amano aims to re-invent the post purchase e-commerce experience ✍️ i5invest published its 2022 European Unicorns and Soonicorns report 🎉
🔥 Story of the Week
Mews, a hospitality tech startup from 🇨🇿, aims to enter 🦄 status in 2022 after closing its next funding round, that it will inititate soon. The company, that provides a cutting-edge property management platform to 2k+ hotels in 62 countries, is already in acquisition mode. A move that not only strengthens its product offering and global reach, but which also pushes its valuation 📈 so unicorn territory is very much reachable. On this note, as the startup just announced, it recently bought Bizzon (digital cash register provider to hotels) and Cenium (direct rival to Mews), two fellow startups. This dynamic expansion strategy (i.e. growing by acquiring) is classic scale-up playbook stuff, used by other CEE companies (👀 Docplanner’s (🇵🇱) acquisition of Jameda (🇩🇪)).
So this year might be huge for Mews, and from my side I can only say…
Show Me Da 💶
👏 Payhawk, a fintech startup from 🇧🇬, raised ca. €90M, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (🇺🇸), with participation from both old and new investors, such as Earlybird (🇩🇪), Jigsaw VC (🇬🇧) and QED (🇺🇸). The startup, that provides an innovative payments platform (i.e. expenses, invoice managment) for businesses, will use the fresh funding to fine-tune its tech and fuel its growth, incl. entrance to the US.
👏 Tenderly, a blockchain startup from 🇷🇸, bagged ca. €36M, led by Spark Capital (🇺🇸), with participation from old/new investors, like Accel (🇺🇸), Point Nine (🇩🇪) and Coinbase Ventures (🇺🇸). The company, that helps developers building Web3 products via its proprietary platform, will use the money for intl. expansion.
👏 Bware Labs, another blockchain startup but this time from 🇷🇴, snatched €6M from a sleuth of investors, including Kosmos Ventures (🇦🇺), Blizzard (🇺🇸) and Hypershpere (🇺🇸). The startup, that operates a decentralized API infrastructure platform, will use the funding to widen its offering and strengthen its team.
👏 Additional investment news that you should know about:
South Central Ventures (🇸🇮), announced a €70M new tech fund - more
Congrats to all!
🚨 Startup Alert
This week’s alert is on Amano, an e-commerce startup from 🇵🇱, that aims to simplify the post purchase experience that currently… well, how to put this…
Between each purchase notification and the actual item delivery we are flooded with promotional e-mails which, in most cases, are absolutely useless. But the real problem is not that they are wortheless, it is the fact that because of these we cannot really track what we bought, when, where and when will it be shipped.
And that is where Amano, a startup launched by seriel entrepreneur duo Małgorzata Sitkowska and Nicolas Jedraszak, comes into the picture. According to them, their solution will solve just that by providing a full overview of all purchases (+ real-time tracking stats and 1-click complaint a/o return process).
Sweet. I can tell you that.
🧠 Food
Austria’s i5invest, an M&A advisor, and i5growth, a venture builder, published a report on startup unicorns and soonicorns (i.e. soon to be unicorns) in Europe.
According to the report, spoiler alert, 85 new 🦄’s were created in Europe in 2021 which translates into 132 companies, overall. Yep, last year was pretty strong. Out of these, the current European top5 (a.k.a highest valued unicorns) are…
Klarna (🇸🇪): €37.5B
Checkout.com (🇬🇧): €35.4B
Revolut (🇬🇧): €27.8B
Northvolt (🇸🇪): €9.7B
Global Switch (🇬🇧): €9.6B
Hats off. And now, get the free report and check it, it is packed with insights.