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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In 2022 the Romanian HealthTech ecosystem grew in maturity and got more visibility on the European map of HealthTech innovation, with the support of catalyst organizations like FreshBlood and ROHealth and through the achievements of MedTech startups like re.flex. The ecosystem has seen in 2022 the launch of Hubvantage, a new mentorship program with the objective of capacity building at the level of the healthtech ecosystem and of BIOdyssey, a hub dedicated to healthcare innovation.

Together with Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Co-Founder and Director of Innovation at FreshBlood HealthTech, the local NGO representing EIT Health in Romania, we reviewed the main highlights of the Romanian HealthTech ecosystem in 2022.

Launch of the Hubvantage mentorship program

Launched at the begining of 2022, Hubvantage is a program organized in collaboration by FreshBlood, HIVE Center for Health Innovation of Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca and Activize that has the objective of capacity building at the level of the HealthTech ecosystem. 

The program is supported by EIT Health and helps health tech founders get reality based feedback from mentors and from more advanced startup founders from the health tech ecosystem.

“Until now we’ve organized seven events that had the purpose of exposing the founders to relevant information, both technical and activity based from the more advanced founders, as well as exposing the doctors with HealthTech, to the innovation mindset and methodology, and examples of innovation from the ecosystem. We are also organizing mentorship sessions based on an evaluation of startup needs that are answered by relevant mentors as well as more advanced founders.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Co-Founder and Director of Innovation at FreshBlood HealthTech, the local NGO representing EIT Health in Romania.

Re.flex, a Romanian HealthTech startup included in the apps approved to be reimbursed in Germany through the DiGA system

In 2022, Romania got more visible on the map of HealthTech innovation and one of the examples is re.flex, a Romanian startup which was included in the apps approved to be reimbursed in Germany through the DiGA system. 

DiGAs are “apps on prescription”, digital health applications that can be prescribed by doctors for patient use for a variety of diagnoses. The introduction of DiGAs is quite revolutionary, and Germany has officially introduced a legal framework to include digital health care innovation into primary care.

re.flex is the most accurate digital assistant for MSK physical therapy on the market. It helps patients treat knee, hip and lower back pain effectively and lasting, using validated exercise protocols. With proven results in reducing pain and improving the quality of life, re.flex offers instant 3D feedback to help patients exercise correctly.

In March, FreshBlood organized an event called Morning Health Talks, which talked specifically about the re.flex achievement of being accepted into DiGA. And this provided a lot of inspiration for potential founders by showcasing the example of the re.flex founder, Camil Moldoveanu, and his team.

“When we started five years ago with FresBlood, we wanted to put Romania on the map. And I do believe that re.flex is the proof of innovation made in Romania that can become a reference in much more advanced markets.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai from FreshBlood HealthTech.

FreshBlood, part of an international consortium with the purpose of identifying and consolidating a portfolio of demand led solutions for the healthcare ecosystem

Recently, FreshBlood became part of an international consortium called DIGIT-PRE, made up of 10 different partners, with the objective to build a collaboration between different partners with the purpose of identifying and consolidating a portfolio of demand led solutions to digitize prevention, prediction and remote care in the healthcare ecosystem. 

The project is focused on the development of the local ecosystem through a call named Interventional Innovation Investment. This consortium is coordinated by ISAB INNOVATION SKANE from Sweden and includes partners from France, Belgium, Finland, Portugal and as well as Hungary and Romania.

“DIGIT-PRE is one of the highlights of the Romanian HealthTech ecosystem, not just for the end of 2022, but will be one of the highlights in the future. We are very happy to be one of the representatives of the Eastern Europe, putting Romania again on the map of healthcare innovation. We are looking forward to connecting this opportunity with the smart specialization strategy of the North-West Region of Romania, but as well as with other regions of Romania.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai from FreshBlood HealthTech.

Healthcare innovation was identified as one of the three priorities of the smart specialization strategy for the Nord-West Region of Romania, so the participation of FreshBlood in the consortium is well in sync with the expectations of growth of the regional ecosystem.

“FreshBlood is a main regional actor for the ecosystem, and its actions of identifying and consolidating a portfolio of demand led solutions for the healthcare ecosystem are filling an important gap between various actors. The strengthening of FreshBlood as an organization, especially with a participation in an international consortium is very well welcomed and in direct correlation with the expectations of growth of our ecosystem. After a rigorous process, health was identified as one of the three priorities of the Smart Specialization Strategy for the Nord-West Region of Romania. So, sustaining the regional HealthTech ecosystem with specific actions correlated with the main needs for its growth is a key area of focus for RDA North-West. This focus is provided through the action plan of the RIS3, including the North-West Regional Programme for 2021-2027 programming period.”, said Cristian Otgon, Head of Smart Specialization Department at North-West Regional Development Agency of Romania.

The North-West Regional Development Agency of Romania, together with Digital Innovation Zone from Iași, was also part of the EIT Health DRIVE program in 2022, designed to upskill organizations from Central-Eastern and Southern Europe in designing validated, sustainable health & life science startup support programmes tailored to regional needs.

Global StartupCities eHealth Program 2022 announced its winner

Global Startup Cities eHealth program was organized by the Hive Center for Health Innovation together with Cluj-Napoca City Hall and Linnify, identifying and supporting startups in the early stage in order to validate their solution through a model that was proposed by Linnify.

This multi-stage EU eHealth startups competition is a chapter of the Global StartupCity Cluj-Napoca and it’s designed to help early stage health innovation entrepreneurs transform their ideas into world changing companies, faster and smarter. Within this program, Cluj-Napoca is taking care of the healthcare and AI components.

The program and the final competition took place in October 2022 and the winning startup, Synaptiq.io, was promoted through the network of global startup cities at the Unique Summit conference in Braga, Portugal, at the end of November. 

“Global StartupCities Health Initiative means for the city of Cluj-Napoca an amazing opportunity to develop and offer support to the regional ehealth ecosystem, by providing to startups customized training and mentoring through its support process. Additionally, the winner of the StartupCities competition will benefit by support for scientific validation and medium-term mentoring.”, says Razvan M. Chereches, MD PhD, Director HIVE Health Innovation Center.

A growth of maturity at the level of the national HealthTech ecosystem

We are seeing a growth of maturity at the level of the national HealthTech ecosystem with some opportunities potentially provided by the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Romania (PNRR) financed by the EU. The telemedicine norms have been released at the end of September and there is hope that Romanian telemedicine startups will also benefit from the implementation of this regulation. 

The end of the year also saw the launch of BIOdyssey, an innovation hub based in Bucharest, which is dedicated to healthcare and it is supported both by the university environment as well as by know-how brought from the USA, but filtered in Israel for a better connection with the environment in Eastern Europe. This hub will train innovators and later on provide the additional funding solutions to the innovators that are actually growing their project at the fundable level.

“BIOdyssey is the first hub focused on innovation in HealthTech in Romania, founded with experts in the field from Israel and the US. Through BIOdyssey we want to help those Romanians who want to develop HealthTech solutions and have an impact on healthcare with the help of technology, by offering them all tools and assistance they need to succeed: an innovation framework which has been tested and validated for many years in Israel, access to international experts in the technical, medical and business fields from Israel, the USA and Japan (among others) to mentor our teams, to help them with identifying and validating ideas that are competitive at a global level and to give them support on the technical and business implementation of those ideas. Concretely, this would include helping entrepreneurs find investors in their field, and opportunities to access our international network of hospitals and accelerators. BIOdyssey offers all of this through 2 distinct programs: the Germination program, which has already started and can be compared to a “Mini MBA for startups” focused on identifying and validating business ideas. The acceleration program follows the 1st, and is focused on accelerating the most promising ideas and teams from the Germination program. Though startups which have not gone through the Germination program are also eligible to apply. BIOdyssey is the bridge in HealthTech between Romania and the most innovative ecosystems in HealthTech in the world: Israel and the US.”, says Elena Ovreiu, co-founder and CEO BIOdyssey.

One other highlight of autumn was the annual hackathon for health organized by the Medical University in Bucharest together with support from Johnson & Johnson. This hackathon once again showed the potential of Romanian innovators to solve relevant problems. Another hackathon, EIT i-Days, was organized in Cluj-Napoca, at the Hive Center for Health Innovation, with support by EIT Health. The event focused on neurology and enjoyed the collaboration with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the jury at the final presentation.

The ecosystem saw activity also at the level of clusters, the healthcare clusters now having their regular conference, at the end of October. Not only a conference where you see people from different institutes of research or from different companies which are focused on innovation in healthcare, but an opportunity to connect to international organizations to explore the partnerships and see potential opportunities of developing your own projects. The BEhealth conference organized by ROHealth cluster, is now an important part of the ecosystem, with FreshBlood and EIT Health supporting both the educational session as well as the international startup competition that took place in the conference.

“Our focus for the next year is very much linked with sustainability. Because in the future there will be less and less money coming from the EU to support innovation. And we need to find internal resources both public and private. And this is going to be done only through partnerships. We are beginning to explore partnerships with potential other players in the ecosystem. We will prepare a fundraising campaign for the beginning of the next year, as well as building on the projects that have been visible and that can make a difference in healthcare in Romania, Europe and in the world.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Co-Founder and Director of Innovation at FreshBlood HealthTech.

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Y Combinator-backed startup Nestor, a People Intelligence Platform that is transforming the way organizations develop and retain talent by creating a common language for skills at work, announced today that it has raised a $2 million seed round for further expansion. The round is led by Eleven Ventures, joined by Underline Ventures, and prominent angel investors from the San Francisco Bay Area. Lead investor, Eleven Ventures has been an early backer and key part of scaling into the global markets of companies such as Payhawk and Gtmhub in verticals like fintech and the future of work.

Over the past years, the transition to hybrid work environments coupled with ongoing phenomena such as the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, have forced organizations to rethink their workforce development strategies. The rigid structure of jobs inside the organizations and pushing training for employees from top down, assuming the organization knows best what are the skills people need, clearly do not work in this new dynamic. Furthermore, this has a negative impact on employees, leaving the individual with the feeling that they have no say over the work that they do. Tomorrow’s workforce development is agile, business-focused, and democratized to give people far more ownership, opportunity, and equity.

Nestor’s People Intelligence Platform brings together employee engagement, performance management, and development planning with a skills-based approach and uses predictive analytics and nudging automation to help organizations develop and retain talent. The solution links skills to the most important talent operations by creating a unified skills-based profile to enable employees to forge new career paths or lateral moves based on both their interests and the organizational needs. With Nestor, each employee is empowered to take ownership of their own development, access new growth opportunities, get involved in cross-functional initiatives, and learn new future-fit skills that will help them succeed.

Nestor is now trusted by HR and people leaders in the most forward-thinking mid-to-large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, across Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestor’s platform achieves a 98% adoption rate in organizations, as employees see a clear output in their individual career growth, develop new skills, discover opportunities, take new roles, and are retained for longer. Recently, UiPath’s Chief Culture Officer Andreea Baciu became an advisor.

This funding round will enable Nestor to grow its sales and customer success teams and accelerate its expansion on the newly entered US and Latin America markets with a focus on mid-to-large enterprises. The company will further invest in its product innovation and plans to launch its smart career pathing module so that employees can easily explore what are the alternative paths they can take in their careers and what skills they should focus on acquiring in the next period. 

“Every employee is unique. We envision a world where every employee receives the right opportunity at the right time to continually learn and improve the skills that will help them succeed. We help organizations make an impact on each employee’s development and enable HR people leaders to build agile people strategies that move beyond the traditional job approach by placing skills at the front and center of their talent operations.”, says Bogdan Apostol, CEO & Co-founder of Nestor.

”We’re excited to work with Bogdan and Raluca. We’ve been knowing them for a long time and they’ve always been passionate about organizational development. We couldn’t be more happier that we were there to help them identify the best partners to scale globally with.”, says Bogdan Iordache, General Partner at Underline.

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On September 21 and 22, at Face Convention Center Bucharest, 2.000 participants from Eastern Europe will meet at How to Web 2022, an event that will mark an important step for those who want to access exclusive business opportunities, connect with like-minded entrepreneurs, marketers, investors or team managers and meet the experts who have made history through their pioneering work methodologies, books or results in the industry.

The How to Web conference offers a complete experience to attendees, with dedicated meeting areas, four stages with industry leaders from around the world, the most intense competition for startups in the region, a dedicated party in collaboration with YouTube Music, and many more.

“Product innovation occurs in stages. There are several elements that make an idea turn into a scalable business, from the moment of launch, the capital attracted, the people in the team, and the project management in general. What excites me is that in recent years the ecosystem in Southeast Europe is undergoing accelerated development. There are more and more opportunities for mentoring, practice, and attracting funding for projects in IT, agriculture, e-health, and even the high-precision industry. All this effervescence of product development initiatives, testing of new business models, and transformation into scalable businesses, are the basis of the formation of a dynamic entrepreneurial community, with unlimited opportunities, according to the human talent of our region.”, says Lavinia Neagoe, Bucharest Technology Site Lead at Google.

The Complete Conference Agenda

The agenda is complete and showcases over 70 industry leaders, many of them for the first time in Romania. Bruce McCarthy, James Mayes, Alexandra Lung, and Matt Lerner are just a few examples of experts who have managed to propel global companies to success and will share their best practices this month, in Bucharest.

The How to Web agenda is mainly inspired by the startup culture, which is based on rapid and efficient decisions for businesses and the methods by which we can bring transformative results in the shortest time. Therefore, the topics will gravitate around this startup culture, putting the light on building high-performing teams, product development, marketing and growth, or the future of innovation.

The speakers’ line-up includes:

• Julia Steier, Product Manager at Google
• Mick Halsband, Founder of Lunar Ventures 
• Bogdan Ripa, VP of Product at UiPath
• Ivan Burazin, Chief Developer Experience Officer at Infobip
• Martin Olczyk, Managing Director at Techstars
• Sultan Seitbekov, Lead Product Manager at Miro
• Christoph Auer-Welsbach, Founder of Kaizo
• Ivan Kovalov, VP of Product at Payhawk
• Valentin Radu, Founder & CEO at Omniconvert
• Carlos Espinal, Managing Partner at Seedcamp

The complete list and agenda of the conference can be visited on the dedicated page: howtoweb.co/agenda/

The Most Intense Competition for Startups in Eastern Europe

Following the annual tradition, the How to Web conference cannot take place without the competition dedicated to early-stage startups — Spotlight. Reaching a record award this year, probably the biggest in this region of Europe, the Spotlight competition is a not to be missed chance for founders who want to propel their startups to success.

With more than 100 renowned mentors and investors from Europe, unique opportunities for collaboration and scaling, an investment prize of almost half a million euros, and other surprises for founders from the event’s partners, Spotlight participants will be able to enjoy an unforgettable experience in their business life.

Following the evaluation of the investor panel, 40 startups were selected to enter the Spotlight 2022 matchmaking program: 121tribe, Adapta Robotics, Atlas Navi, Avo Cool, Avokaado, Beesers, Bitskout, Bloomcoding, Braight, Clastr, ClientZen, CPV Lab Pro, DEA Medicine, Directimo, dMonitor, Epic Visits, ExigoHealth, Eyelet, Fagura, Getpin, Gorilla Link, GuidefAI, Help2Go, Holoma, Hyperhuman, Hyperjob, INKI.TECH, INPUT SOFT, InRento, Licenseware, LINK, MediNav, NRGI.ai, Palmo, Prime Dash, Proofminder, SOLO, Synaptiq, Vestinda, Virbe and Voxa.

Of these, 20 will be selected as semi-finalists during the conference, entering the race for the grand prize and benefiting from multiple opportunities such as exhibiting the startup in the dedicated pavilion, mentoring sessions, meetings with investors, or other prizes from BRD – Groupe Société Générale or F6S, the platform dedicated to founders.

Last Days to Get Your Ticket

The event takes place between September 21 and 22 in the most modern event space in Romania, Face Convention Center Bucharest. Created to meet the needs of each type of participant, the event will be a complete experience with professional inspiration, business meetings, discovering the latest innovations, or spending quality time with the team or friends.

These are the last days when you can get your ticket and join the leading startup & innovation conference in Eastern Europe: howtoweb.co/tickets/

The event is created in partnership with Google for Startups, Mastercard Romania, BRD – Groupe Société Générale, Underline Ventures, and Orange Romania, and with the support of UiPath, Bitdefender, eMag Ventures, KPMG Romania, European Innovation Council, Tazz, Mobiversal, Fortech Investments, LAUNCHub Ventures, Endeavor, SeedBlink, Startup Wise Guys, Make IT in Oradea, Rubik Hub, and Vienna Business Agency.

About How to Web

How to Web is the leading startup & innovation conference in Eastern Europe.

Initiated in 2009, How to Web is one of the earliest influential European startup conferences, which has accelerated the adoption of the startup culture and innovation in Eastern Europe & Romania.

Our main focus has been to create a web of learning and networking opportunities that can empower the innovative minds in this region.

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The fifth edition of Launch Community Evenings will take place at Club Expirat, Bucharest, on September 20. Among the guests of the event you can find representatives from Fitbit, BCR, UiPath, TypingDNA, archbee, Flip.ro, The Recursive and FameUp.

Launch – the startup founders’ community – brings the meeting as a satellite event of the How to Web 2022 Conference, which takes place in Bucharest on September 21-22.

The event is moderated by Mircea Serediuc (Product Manager, FameUp) and comes as an opportunity to discover innovative products and projects, but also for networking with founders, company representatives and technology enthusiasts. Founders from top startups of the Launch community will pitch their products to the public and receive feedback from the evening’s guests:

• Daniel Rizea – Director Software Engineering, Fitbit
• Ionuț Stanimir – Director of Marketing & Communication, BCR
• Lavinia Cojocaru – Co-founder, UiPath
• Cristian Tamaș – Co-founder & CMO, TypingDNA
• Dragoș Bulugean – Founder, archbee
• Alex Burghelia – Co-founder, Flip.ro

The program also includes a talk with Cristian Tamaș (TypingDNA) and Dragoș Bulugean (archbee) about their journey in startup life, from the beginning to the present. The moment will be moderated by Elena Vrabie (Sales & Senior Content Manager, The Recursive) and is intended to help the founders of the community learn new ways to overcome their obstacles related to the development of their companies.

The meeting takes place five months after the launch of Launch Community Evenings event series, which has already gathered hundreds of founders, enthusiasts and actors of the technology and innovation industry from the local entrepreneurial ecosystems in the capital, but also in Timișoara, Cluj-Napoca and Iași.

Access to the event is free, and invitations are limited: https://bit.ly/launch-community-evenings-5

For over a year and a half, Launch – the community of startup founders – has been contributing to the increase of founder’s success chances, at the beginning of their journey, providing access to individual meetings with experts and representatives of companies from various industries, group activities together with other founders from the entire ecosystem in Romania. Currently, the community includes over 300 founders from over 100 startups, and registrations are always open. Launch is an initiative of How to Web, Google for Startups and InnovX-BCR.

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Investor and founder Bogdan Iordache is launching Underline Ventures, a solo general partner venture fund targeting early-stage high-growth Eastern European startups with global ambitions, thus joining the ranks of solo VC managers emerging in Europe. Underline Ventures’ debut fund has raised €10m, with a final target of €20m.

Best known as the founder of How to Web, one of Europe’s top 10 startup conferences, started in 2010, Bogdan has also been the founder of Conectoo (exited in 2013) and a former investor for Gecad Ventures, 3TS Capital Partners, and MVP Academy.

”Our fund thesis is generational. We believe the Eastern European tech industry hit a critical mass of experienced founders and operators from scale-ups that are now starting or contributing to new startups, along with many young ambitious founders. While their expertise is excellent on the operational side, we believe Underline Ventures can help them understand the venture way and connect them with the world of venture capital, so they can build high-growth startups, not only successful companies“, Bogdan says.

Underline Ventures is backed by 20+ founders and early-stage operators from companies such as UiPath, Green Horse Games, Telerik, Elrond, MorphL, Smartbill, CleverTaxi, Tremend, and many others, along with professional investors in venture funds.

The fund is already a one-year effort, and the team includes experienced founders and operators from the tech world: Vlad Ionescu – Venture Partner, ex-UiPath, Iulian Circiumaru – Venture Partner, ex-7Card, Iulia Ghita – Investment Manager, ex-Bookster, Adriana Spulber, Sebastian Boureanu, Mihaela Ciobanu.

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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.

The post Starting a business during pandemic, insights from the founders of Mingle, a Bucharest-based HR startup appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

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.

The post Questo’s city exploration mobile game, winner of people’s choice award at Phocuswright Europe 2019 appeared first on Startups&TheCity.