GapMinder Venture Partners | Startups&TheCity

Beez, the Romanian fintech set to disrupt the way people are buying online or in brick-and-mortar shops

Sebastian Florian — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 11:31:19 +0000

Beez founders, Vasile Tamas and Lucian Cramba. A startup born in Cluj, Transylvania, Romania. Photo: Startups&TheCity / Diana Campian.

With the help of a newly received financing round of €1.2M, Cluj-based fintech startup Beez, now operating on Romanian and UK markets, is set to disrupt the way people are buying. Beez users are empowered to make their purchases in installments, with no interest, eliminating the need of traditional bank-based financing. Besides financing their purchase, the benefits for users also include cashback, sweet deals and other rewards.

The Beez Pay feature allows buyers to make purchases with a minimum upfront payment, while paying the rest through a system of installments spread over a period of up to 45 days without any fees or interest. The feature is available within the Beez app for online shopping and will be tested in brick-and-mortar shops in Romania and UK within the next few weeks.

The Beez platform is looking to solve both the merchant challenges of acquiring & retaining customers while also increasing the average basket value spent, and the customer financing needs. On average, Beez partners see a 20% increase in conversion and a 30-40% increase in the average order value.

Beez eliminates the bank from the transactions, supporting the financing cost directly from the retailer as a wholesale discount. Beez’s scoring mechanism uses proprietary machine learning algorithms which considers nearly 100 data points to determine in real-time whether consumers qualify for the payment deferral.

Shoppers search for a store or a product on the Beez platform and are redirected to the retail partner’s website where they complete the purchase and are then notified that the cashback sum has been saved in their Beez account. Beez supports the financing costs of the loans by working directly with the retailer who passes on a wholesale discount to Beez.

“We saw that 70% of credit card owners end up paying interest and often at eye-watering levels in order to buy products from these same retailers. We believe there is a way to help retailers decrease their marketing costs while also helping their customers reduce the cost of financing”, says Lucian Cramba, Co-Founder of Beez.

The Romanian users of the Beez app also have the option to donate the money obtained from the cashback of their purchases to children with serious illnesses.

Just one year and a half and since its launch, Beez already has over 160,000 users, saving them over €290,000 in transactions. 85% of the e-commerce market in Romania and UK is available to shoppers through the Beez platform, and the merchant list includes big names like booking.com or aliexpress.com.

The €1.2M investment round Beez announced in February has been lead by a private investor, along GapMinder Venture Partners and RocaX investments funds. The total amount attracted by the startup, founded in 2018 by Vasile Tamas and Lucian Cramba, has reached €1.65M so far.

The Beez app is available for download on Android and iOS.

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The Beez app is providing shoppers an alternative “buy now, pay later” model, with no interest, no late fees and… Read More

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Bucharest-based FintechOS, raises USD 14 Million to continue its rapid growth across Europe and expansion in US and South East Asia

Sebastian Florian — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 09:09:50 +0000

Sergiu Neguț and Teodor Blidăruş, co-founders of FintechOS. Photo: FintechOS.

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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Rocket fuel for the tech startup scene in Romania: GapMinder Venture Partners will double the money angels from Techangels Romania invest in startups

Sebastian Florian — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 11:29:13 +0000

Photo: Techcelerator

In a first of a kind partnership in Romania, GapMinder Venture Partners announced it will double the money angels from Techangels Romania will invest in startups, for any investment between 40,000 and 200,000 euro. The main goal of the partnership is to increase the amount of angel-investments, with an estimated 5 up to 10 investments to be made in the following 12 months.

The companies selected for this program will have access to a cumulated round of investments of up to 400,000 euro, also benefiting from the support of the institutional investor GapMinder by accessing its partners’ know-how and other potential rounds of investments. Since January 2018, when it was created, until now, GapMinder invested in 31 companies and reached a threshold of 40 million Euro as fund size.

“Angel investor investments are the basis of any healthy startups ecosystem, which is the reason why investors can have a substantial contribution for the companies’ development. The angel investors are mainly successful entrepreneurs. Thus, a startup can benefit from their experience regarding multiple business aspects, from employment policy to products strategy and operational aspects. The partnership with TechAngels is the first step we make in this direction and we are open to similar partnerships with other angel investors groups, in the future”, said Cosmin Ochișor, GapMinder Partner.

GapMinder-TechAngels partnership aspires to becoming a model of good practice regarding the way in which such investments are made, with the aim to equally protect the companies which benefit from the investments and the investors.

“The venture capital investments’ philosophy is that the founders of the company should maintain control over these ones as much as possible and after two or three rounds of investments they should still own over 50% of the company”, explained Cosmin Ochișor.

On his turn, Malin Iulian Ștefănescu, TechAngels President added: “Technological innovation can be Romania’s main competitive advantage. TechAngels brings together angel investors who, individually or together, in syndicated rounds, provide financial resources and business experience to facilitate the growth and internationalization of Romanian technology start-ups. TechAngels investors are entrepreneurs and executives from corporations, with significant experience in their area of activity and well connected, not only with the leaders from different industries, but also with national and abroad investment funds. The partnership with GapMinder comes after an excellent collaboration over time and I believe that it will increase both the funds’ volume to which startups will have access, as well as the value of their results”.

About GapMinder Venture Partners BV

GapMinder Venture Partners BV is an investment fund set to provide capital for early stage companies with traction and for developing technology SMEs in expansion phase both on local or international level. The focus is on technology and services, sectorial diversification, product-centric and team-centric targets. GapMinder invests in Series A, Seed, and pre-Seed rounds.

Fund’s partners have a hands-on approach as investors, enhancing companies’ organic growth via direct involvement in operational streamlining, corporate governance, financial discipline, and coaching management.

The fund is co-financed through the Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020.

About TechAngels

TechAngels was founded in 2013 with the aim of becoming a common meeting point between tech startups and investors. The group has two main objectives: educate and support young entrepreneurs throughout investments, access to the accelerations programs and many other resources necessary for developing their own business and to encourage the potential angel investors to take the first steps in this field.

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