Budapest Letters #55
🤖 Programming note: Budapest Letters will be off next week, due to national holidays (“All Saints”) in Hungary. Back on 7 November!
👋🏻 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 #55, 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: ✍🏻 Fresh data from Unconventional Ventures show that women are mostly neglected by the 🇪🇺 venture capital industry ✍🏻 Straal, Upheal and Gridio raised 💶 ✍🏻 Estonia’s Salu aims to revolutionize how private individuals interact with doctors ✍🏻 UiPath moves into startup mafia territory
🔥 Story of the Week
Honestly, this feels… 💩
Despite all the positive news on progress and attention grabbing initiatives it seems that actual development is not taking place when it comes to championing female talent and entrepreneurs. It simply does not happen. They are not being promoted to partners at VC funds and they are not given checks by VCs 😭
It is a seriously sorry state that is even more horrible given the fact that Unconventional Ventures annual funding report focuses on the Nordics, a region that prides itself on progressivism, including full equality among genders.
Well, based on the data, this proudness is slightly unwarranted:
In the Nordics, all-men founding teams were allocated 88,2% of all capital deployed during 2021. Mixed teams secured 10,7% and all-women founding teams a meagre 1,1%.
Funds with only men as GPs account for 77% of the amount of funds and manage 84% of capital. While funds with all-women GPs account for 6% of the amount of funds, managing only 1% of the capital.
Show Me Da 💶
👏🏻 Straal, a fintech startup from 🇵🇱, bagged €2M from My EU Pay (🇬🇧), a fellow payments startup, in part of their newly announced merger. The Polish company, that offers its clients payment processing, client onboarding, customer behavior analytics and anti-fraud solutions, will use the fresh funding and merge to scale.
👏🏻 Upheal, a healttech startup from 🇨🇿, nabbed bit more than €1M led by Kaya VC (🇨🇿), with participation from Calm/Storm (🇦🇹) and Credo Ventures, another local VC firm. The startup, that provides mental health professionals with high-quality video calling features, automated session transcripts and summaries, will use the fresh raise to grow within 🇪🇺 and further accelerate product development.
👏🏻 Gridio, a cleantech startup from 🇪🇪, received €1M from a sleuth of Nordic investors. The startup, that developed a smart energy app, will use its funding to fine-tune its product and enter new markets, possibly outside of the Nordics.
🚨 Startup Alert
This week’s alert is on Salu, a healttech startup from 🇪🇪, that just raised €350k from Krokodilli Capital, a local VC fund, to boost its product development and international expansion. Founded this year by Andreas Kotsjuba, the startup provides a fully-fledged healthcare platform for (chiefly) digital nomads.
In practice, this translates into a monthly packages that includes consultations with a doctor, renewing prescription drugs, issuing referrals and even in-person appointments to hospitals and clinics. So almost eveything one could ask for ☺️
🧠 Food
You probably all know the graphs of the so-called international “startup mafias” like Skype (Estonia), Gojek (Indonesia), Alibaba (China) and of course the mother of all them, PayPal (USA). In brief, these are the companies that serve as a quasi-breeding ground for entrepreneurs whom, after a successful stint or longer tenures at these scale-ups, venture out and found there own things, e.g. Tesla.
But folks, and this is big big news, after decades of longing for such an example from this part of CEE (i.e. non-Baltic), it seems that the time has finally arrived in the shape of UiPath, a US-based Romanian unicorn. And thanks to this, Elena Vrabie’s (The Recursive) article, “UiPath’s Startup Tribe: See How They Fuel The Romanian Tech Ecosystem“, is a joy to read; especially given the several women (e.g. Ana Cinca, Andra Malina Platon) it helped catapult. Go and read it, it is pure 🔥