Veridion (formerly known as Soleadify) announces a $6 million late seed round to expand to US and further develop their proprietary AIs that are specifically trained to understand the global business landscape, enabling their clients, including tier 1 consultancies and market intelligence firms, to access reliable data on 80 million businesses worldwide, saving thousands of hours of manual research and achieving record accuracy and refresh rates.

The deep tech startups raised the seed round from LAUNCHub Ventures, OTB Ventures, Underline Ventures, and existing investors Day One Capital and GapMinder Venture Partners.

Veridion leverages the power of AI to revolutionize big data and to comprehend billions of webpages every week in order to build and maintain a highly accurate, global scale, near real-time, single-source-of-truth database of company data made available through a Complex Search API and a Matching & Enriching API.

They are one of the first companies to deploy AI at this scale for data acquisition, setting them apart from the traditional firmographic data players that buy data from government registries as well as simple web-scraping alternative data providers.

Firmographic data is information that can be used to categorize organizations by a host of information such as business activity, products or services offered, location, employees, industry, technology offered etc. Enterprises are missing reliable, up-to-date information about market participants and a lack of those crucial insights leads to sub-optimal decisions and challenges when navigating through dynamically changing environments.

Veridion is positioned to be a firmographic intelligence leader, boasting a database of over 60 data points on over 80 million businesses with record accuracy rates and the highest refresh rate on the market.

Veridion saw solid growth figures in 2022, with over 3x increase in recurring revenue and an impressive zero churn in clients. Their biggest clients include, among others, tier 1 consultancies with specialized procurement and insurance teams, one of the largest global insurtech platforms, procurement platforms, and top tier market intelligence companies. There are multiple reasons for this, key among which is their highly granular data, the control their APIs offer on confidence scores and their internal matching engine which allows them to pinpoint businesses at unprecedented rates.

The name change is intended to highlight the company’s unique standing in the market, their commitment to being a single source of truth and reflect the company’s ambitious plans for future growth.

Florin Tufan, founder and CEO, Veridion: “We believe that the next generation of business decision engines, regardless of industry or vertical will require a completely new format of data. Predictive models will rely on AI more than human intuition and will be capable of processing exponentially more data as their core resource. For this, the data needs to be fresh, granular, easy to work with, and integrate-able across a wide array of processes. This has been our focus from the beginning and with this round, we’ll be able to double down on our approach.”

The firmographic data market in which Veridion operates is also known as the business information market and was valued at $211 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow towards $291 billion by 2027, with new technologies like AI representing a game-changer for big data. According to Gartner’s Data Quality Market Survey, the average financial impact of bad data on organizations in 2022 was estimated to be around  $12.9 million per year.

Recent developments in ML capabilities unlocked the doors for Veridion to be positioned quite differently from other market participants. Players such as Delphai, Planck Data, and Grata have collectively raised over $110M in the past 7 years of operations and development. While companies like these cover local markets and company records in the 10 – 20 million range, Veridion boasted over 70 million company records within their first two years of activity.

Delphai covers primarily private markets for M&A, prospecting and supplier sourcing, segments where Veridion brings in-depth data on hundreds of millions of products and services and business activities in all commonly used taxonomies worldwide such as NAICS, NACE, SIC, etc on companies from all around the world. Planck Data is focused on commercial underwriting but only covers the US market as opposed to Veridion’s global coverage and Grata, which is focused primarily on deal sourcing also lacks the in-depth perspective that Veridion brings on specific company descriptions, risk signals and other rapidly expanding data points that Veridion extracts on the companies they oversee.

The biggest name in firmographic data is Dun & Bradstreet, with over 200 years experience in the field. Dun & Bradstreet and Veridion may serve slightly different market segments, but their differences are pronounced when it comes to data products and capabilities. Veridion offers a distinct advantage in its coverage of the SMB landscape, with regularly refreshed data and in-depth product-level information and retail locations. The NLP-based approach employed by Veridion also enables the extraction of unique data attributes for specific industries, such as specific underwriting and supplier risks, enabling the company to better meet the needs of its clients through custom data solutions.

After validating their data with large enterprise clients in commercial insurance underwriting, supplier discovery, and private market analysis, Veridion is releasing self-service APIs to enable faster data integration for potential clients and open up to new markets in data-centric SaaS or other early-stage solutions.

Veridion plans to continue building its US footprint by opening a New York office in 2023 to more closely support their growing base of clients in the region.

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Bucharest-based Mingle is a friendly online platform designed to make recruiting easier for companies. It provides HR teams with simple ways to collaborate, organize and automate their work so they can hire the best people. Mingle is currently focusing on the Romanian market, an emerging economy with relatively low digitalization that is ripe for disruption. The founders of Mingle shared with us the story of their startup and some key insights into the challenges they faced and how they’ve managed to overcome them.

The story

During the final months of 2019, most of our afternoons were spent searching for the idea. We knew it was a matter of time before we would fall out of love with our jobs, so we wanted to build a business that could make us happier. Eventually, we found the niche market we were looking for: small enough to be able to dominate it one day, but big enough to be profitable. It also matched our expertise and skills, so we went further: we pitched the idea to possible customers, then adjusted. We built a prototype, collected feedback, then adjusted it some more. Talks were going well, so we quit our jobs in March 2020, two weeks before a nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19. Oops.

All panic aside, we spent the first days paying a lot of attention to the market, trying to determine if our poorly-timed venture was worth pursuing. And we did see an interesting shift. Our target market – usually not very enthusiastic about tech – was now adopting technology at an unbelievable pace. Betting that this change would be here to stay, our business model was still looking solid in the long run, despite the pandemic. So we decided to give it a shot.

Why is it hot? Because we do this at a time when recruiting in our market is being redefined. Companies are starting to reform the way they hire people, and this is only accelerated by the health crisis. The days of paper CVs, complicated spreadsheets or candidate databases that resemble Black Holes are coming to an end. Companies need better software that is suited for remote hiring teams and recruitment. Software that is easy to use and can help recruiters make smarter decisions, faster.

Why do we matter? Instead of adapting old software to modern times like most alternatives, we design a fresh experience from scratch, suitable for tomorrow’s users. With Mingle you get started fast, you find everything in the right place and you get things done. It has all you need and nothing you don’t. We use advanced technology to build a platform that is modular, light and fast. And most importantly, we use real customer data and feedback to grow our product.

Who’s behind this? Into building this, passionate people had to put in real work. Our team scores well across a spectrum from creative to technical. Catalina is the creative doer – she rocks marketing and design. Alexandru is the genius architect – he makes amazing software. All while Bogdan makes sure everything fits into the masterplan – he does product strategy and sales.

Key insights from launching a startup in COVID times

Even with a great team, opening our doors as a business when everybody was shutting theirs down was uncomfortable. Such an unprecedented situation brought us new challenges we didn’t study about in business school, but also a few unexpected advantages as well. Now that you have the big picture, we’ll share 3 stories about the impact of the COVID crisis on our early stage startup.

1. Getting your product validated when people have much bigger problems

When social distancing became the norm, HR teams rushed to migrate their workforce remote, restructure their organization and freeze recruitment budgets. To our newly launched hiring software, this seemed like a nightmare. How do you convince people to try your product when they first have to worry about job loss and depression and disease?

The original plan would have us validate the product via direct sales – a typical B2B practice which we were familiar with – but at that moment it just didn’t feel right. So instead we switched focus towards building a content marketing strategy, something none of us had done before. This turned out to be good for 2 reasons:

• Better insights about our market. Before anyone knew anything about us, we created a blog and started pushing daily relevant articles, free resources and updates about the changing HR trends. By measuring audience response (reading time, resource downloads, reactions, shares etc.) we got to know more about our target market: what subjects spark their interest, what areas they want to improve or what challenges they want to overcome.
• Better awareness. We thought this could help us increase the chance of people replying to our sales emails later on. And it did! 20% of HR professionals we get to demo say they read our blog.

Finding early adopters who pay money for your product is hard. It’s perhaps the hardest thing we had to do. But being empathetic with the customers in those early days helped us turn a bad situation into a chance to know them better.

2. Failing faster

Being in a startup environment, failure is mostly inevitable. We had our share of poor decisions that lost us time or money. And since our time and money are limited, it’s usually better we fail faster, so we can learn faster, so we can move on faster. From this point of view, we believe the pandemic actually helped us.

Initially, Mingle was supposed to be a tool for boosting employee referrals. The concept seemed very interesting for many HR professionals to whom we have talked, so we built an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). 

Fast forward 2 months into the crisis, the MVP was ready to be validated in the real world. We started reaching out to companies, trying to sell them our software.

Such a process usually looks like this: you find suitable clients, you convince them to meet you, then there’s the meeting, after which they talk to their bosses about you, get approvals etc. It’s a lengthy cycle that may take months until you collect enough feedback to validate or invalidate your product.

But there’s one different thing about collecting feedback in the COVID era. Meeting clients online opens up the possibility to be much more efficient.

We saved tons of time of preparation and travelling between meetings, allowing us to have up to 5 client demos per day without even leaving the house. We were able to talk to as many clients as possible right when we needed them the most.

Eventually, when final decisions started coming in, they were mostly bad news. We learned that helping companies get more employee referrals was just a part of a bigger problem they had – and solving referrals wouldn’t make that main problem go away.

Unfortunately, we had to pivot the business and change the whole strategy. But on the bright side, it only took us 3 weeks to reach that conclusion. Failing faster saved us months of development and resources spent in the wrong direction.

3. Bootstrapping through uncertain times

Mingle started out with 3 people and €30.000 initial investment from personal funds. Bootstrapping during a pandemic can be quite scary – it comes with lots of challenges we can’t control, like the market reaction to another lockdown or wide scale job cuts. Nevertheless, it can be fun if you are comfortable with some compromises. 

For example, you may need to change your way of life as a human to improve the likelihood of success for your company. And with many activities restricted due to COVID, minimizing living expenses has never been more convenient.

The past few months have also been amazing for focus. Working from home gave us better control, allowing us to remove unnecessary distractions and work on the things that mattered the most. And this was crucial in a stage where everyone’s contribution to the grand total is so significant.

It’s certainly not easy to bootstrap, but for us it felt like a suitable choice for those early times.

Future plans

Going through a rollercoaster of validation, failure and compromises while everyone was running away from a deadly virus was both an exciting and challenging journey when looking in retrospective. But what’s more exciting to us is the future.

At this point, Mingle has reached some important milestones. We now have a validated product, with real clients and ambitious plans for the future. We will continue to pour all our passion and talent into developing a service that will become the absolutely obvious solution for all HR needs in a company by 2025.

In order to get there, we are considering working with partners and investors who could help us take this to the next level and deliver on our promise. 

Learn more about Mingle and get in touch with its founders, here.

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Green Spots’s innovative urban solar charging station has been awarded ‘Project of the Year in Smart Energy’ at Romania’s Smart City Industry Awards 2019, which took place in Bucharest on the 11th of December. Green Spots provides safe, clean power for mobile devices in any outdoor environment. Cluj-Napoca was the first city in Romania to use Green Spots urban chargers in 2018, as part of a pilot project with UNTOLD Festival, the local authorities and an utility company.

“Green Spots is more than a smart city solution for charging mobile devices with renewable energy. It is part of our company long term strategy to develop regionally and internationally as a Romanian innovative business. Alongside the Green Spots project, we are developing Urban Regeneration Strategies for Romania’s cities together with the World Bank. Also, we are now having talks with companies in Germany, Malta and Abu Dhabi to implement Green Spots in those places in 2020. This gives us energy and trust to go further and we strongly encourage existing and future Romanian entrepreneurs to join us.”, said Cristian Danciu, Partner & Co-Founder at Green Spots.

The Green Spots project was launched in 2018 by a team of Romanian architects from Bucharest-based Triptic Studio. The charging stations that convert solar energy into electricity are produced in a factory in Braila, Romania. The electricity of the charging stations is produced by photovoltaic panels, which can supply energy up to 12 devices simultaneously. The built-in lithium-ion battery stores energy for a total of 300 charges, and the charging stations can be used both during the day and at night.

Smart City Industry Awards Romania (SCIA) is an annual event designed to recognize and promote the ideas, projects, people, government institutions, associations and companies involved in the Smart City Industry in Romania. The 4th edition was dedicated to projects under implementation. The main objective is to encourage the development of future creative-intelligent communities, in which residents feel a significant improvement in the quality of life. 

The 10 interest categories of this edition of SCIA were: Smart Mobility, Smart Economy, Smart Government, Smart Citizen, Smart Environment, Smart Living, Smart Energy, Best AI Project, Smart Education and Smart Real Estate and Residential.

Winners of Smart City Industry Awards 2019

Smart Mobility:

1. Transport Infrastructure Project: Baia Mare City Hall. Project: Cross-border green transport network – Ecological cross-border transport network.
2. Best Public Transport Project: Suceava City Hall. Project: Electromobility – Electric vehicles for a green municipality.
3. Smart infrastructure: Sixense. Project: Târnava Bridge, Sighișoara – Railway arch bridge, Corridor IV Pan European.
4. Best Ride Sharing Project: Mojito Software SRL. Project: BCR eGo-CarSharing.
5. Accessibility: Brașov City Hall. Project: Computerized management of the public transport system.
6. Transportation Alternatives: Curtea de Argeș City Hall. Project: Development of a modern, accessible and sustainable transport system in Curtea de Argeș Municipality.
7. Best Mobility Project: E-Government Solutions. Project: e-Mobility – A possible dream in Sector 4 of Bucharest.

Smart Economy:

1. Best Start-Up: Eventya Co SRL. Project: Eventya.
2. Young Smart Innovator of the Year: Over4 Association. Project: Over4.

Smart Government:

1. Digital City: Iași City Hall. Project: From Citizens and Sensors to Digitization.
2. Transparency and Access to Information: TUD Investment Consulting. Project: Budget Green.

Smart Citizen:

1. Civic Engagement: Iași AI. Project: Iași Smart City
2. Best Project: – two winning projects were selected:

• Craiova City Hall. Project: ARCA – Accessibility of procedures administrative by Reducing bureaucracy and digitization for BANNA Citizens.
• SC Life Is Hard SA. Project: City Health.

Smart Environment:

1. Best Smart Environment Project: Beia Consult International. Project: CitiSim – Smart City 3D Simulation and Monitoring Platform.

Smart Living:

1. Smart Tourism: SC Doorieapp SRL. Doorie Project App
2. Smart Health: Bolyai Babes University. Project: Smart Rad-EN
3. Best CSR Project: Zitec. Project: #1010.

Smart Energy:

1. Project of the Year: Green Spots Technology. Project: Green Spots.

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Bucharest-based FintechOS raises USD 14 million to continue its rapid growth across Europe and to expand to South East Asia and the US markets. FintechOS will also invest in the continued development of more pre-built apps, services and solutions to break down the barriers to multi-channel customer service. The company focuses on hyper-personalised and true end-to-end automated financial technology, non-expensive and easily integrated with existing systems, allowing financial products and services delivery at unprecedented speed – weeks rather than months or years.

The financing was been led by the Digital East Fund of Earlybird Venture Capital and OTB Ventures, with follow-on participation from existing investors Gapminder Ventures and Launchub. In 2018, the company registered 1.1 million Euros in revenue. This year’s target is expected to exceed this figure by over 450%, with similar growth predicted in 2020.

According to Teodor Blidăruş, CEO and co-founder of FintechOS, demand for technology that allows banks, insurers and other financial services companies to transform the digital customer experience has never been higher, looking at the success of disrupting and innovating brands like Monzo or Revolut.

“Our disruptive approach is customer, not technology driven. We’ve created FintechOS to transform the financial industry, empowering banks and insurance companies to act and react faster than fintechs, to create a smarter, slicker customer experience. As a result, hyper-personalised services and elevated customer experiences are now available almost plug and play.”, states Teodor Blidăruș, CEO and Co-Founder of FintechOS.

FintechOS technology empowers traditional banks and insurance companies to adapt to rapidly changing customer expectations, and match the speed and flexibility of Fintechs, their new and technology driven competitors. Their platform provides end-to-end digital automation for all insurance and banking products, in an inexpensive way and working seamlessly alongside the existing technology infrastructure. The platform can be deployed both as part of multi-cloud SaaS, helping clients transition to the cloud, and on premises deployments.

„FintechOS is changing paradigms. It is transformative for the financial services industry, and possible other industries in the future. Its vision and state of the art technology help today banks and insurance companies to dramatically speed up the implementation of new and fully automated ways to deliver their own services to their customers or to interact with their own employees and ecosystems. And all these in a non-expensive way and easily interacting with existing systems. For the Series A investment round we are confident to follow-on and see their international hyper-growth going further”, declared Dan Mihaescu, Founding Partner of GapMinder. In 2018, GapMinder led the seed round of investment for the same company, and made a follow-on investment at the current round.

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Bucharest-based startup Questo, developers of a city exploration mobile game now present in more than 40 European cities, has won the People’s Choice Award at Phocuswright Europe, one of the biggest travel conferences in the world held in Amsterdam on 15-16th of May 2019.

Questo’s app helps tourists explore cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome or Berlin by solving clues in order to discover new places and stories about them. Each route (quest) they explore is based on a specific theme, which can be inspired by a movie, a book, a historical fact or just a local legend. In London, for instance, travelers can explore the city as Sherlock Holmes or Isaac Newton, while in Paris they can play as Hemingway or Picasso.

So far, more than 40,000 people finished a quest while walking more than 100.000 kilometers to discover popular and hidden locations, as well as local stories using Questo. As of today, the app has over 100 available quests created by a growing network of local content creators. They can be purchased inside the Questo iOS and Android apps, on TripAdvisor, on GetYourGuide and Booking.com, for prices ranging from 8 to 30 Euro. Questo is also a previous winner of the Booking.com Booster Lab 2018 in Tel Aviv.

“This award represents an important recognition for Questo and offers a strong signal about how tours and activities will be disrupted by technology and gamification“, said Alex Govoreanu, CEO of Questo. “We have received significant interest from top tour operators and travel agencies in Europe that will help us market our game to tourists traveling around Europe. Because we are disrupting the $160+ Billion global market for tours and activities, we attracted the attention of several high-level investors as we are about to launch a funding round this summer that will help us boost our growth globally.“

In the beginning of 2019, Questo has announced it has secured a seed round of funding from private angel investors. The money raises the valuation of the startup at more than $1.5 million and will be used for fueling the expansion in some of the largest cities in the world: London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona and more.

The company also works with brands such as Samsung or Bitdefender, tourism agencies and other companies to create custom quests that offer a unique travel experience for their customers and employees.

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