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German Startup Week

This week was busy: NEXT Berlin startup conference was taking place, and I attended with an aim connect to the bustling startup scene in Germany. So yes, it is bustling, and for a moment I thought it would be good to move to Berlin (not happening though).

NEXT Berlin was good for networking, so I had busy schedule and met founders from Slovenian Slidemotion, Hungarian PocketGuide and Polish Audioteka. Unfortunately the panel on Eastern Europe did not do justice to the topic despite a presence of a high profile panelist Maelle Gavet, the CEO of Ozon. Grzegorz Marczak of the leading Polish tech blog AntyWeb and I were sitting in the audience instead of joining the panel. This was odd (note to self: apply for a speaker’s slot next year – there is so much to say).

Thanks to Pawel Chudzinski of Point Nine Capital I also briefly appeared at the European Venture Market, a small conference with a main focus on early / expansion stage startups pitching to the investors. That week and the week before Berlin was literally packed with tech entrepreneurs flocking to these and other conferences, including re:publica, Eureka!, Startup Weekend Berlin, BetaPitch and a number of private gatherings.

But enough about my startup adventures. Oh, no wait, here is one more thing. In Berlin I met Arek Senko, the co-founder of Polish Red Sky Group. Arek created Filestube together with Maciej Zawisza de Sulima.

Do you know how huge Filestube is? 6 million daily users, and if in doubt, check Alexa. It is a search engine for files, software, games, lyrics, mobile apps and more. Red Sky is the biggest Polish success story, a profitable company, and a global one to that.  A separate post is in the works, watch this space.

Moving on to the weekly news.

Dealflow

Yes, this might be the right name for this section.

Croatian Farmeron raised $1.4 million to bring cloud-based data analytics to the farmers. Tons of coverage on global tech blogs, Forbes and other online media.

Cherry Media, the largest daily deals group in the Baltic Rim, and since a few months ago a member of Slevomat Group family, has acquired CityLife in Latvia in what has been described by the Arctic Startup as a stock swap. Now Cherry has over 50 percent of the daily deals market share in the region.

According to VentureVillage, Russian billionaire Lev Blavatnik is rumoured  to have invested $200 million in Rocket Internet, bringing the total funding of Samwer brothers’ business to $1,1 billion. Another investor in Rocket Internet ventures Yuri Milner was covered by Bobbie Johnson on GigaOm, who suggested that Facebook and Silicon Valley owe it to Moscow.

Hungarian Antavo has been picked by Seedcamp at its Israeli event. Antavo is a online promotion builder for SMEs. The company started building the product in June, I met the company co-founder Zsuzsa Szabó during Credo Week in Budapest last summer. Since then the startup launched public beta and got 1800 customers from 90 countries.

Another investment by Seedcamp is an HTML5 gaming engine MightyFingers from Latvia.

A Polish mobile games company Vivid Games has raised 710,000 Euro, reports Szymon Szymczyk on EastIst. One of the new investors is Giza Polish Ventures, which acquired 18 percent stake in the company.

Startup Sauna announced the names its teams going to Silicon Valley. The list includes AdDuplex from Lithuania, Goodbuzz (UK, Lithuania) and OmyConf (Russia). Latvian Infogr.am is still unsure whether it can make the trip.

Romanian UberVu was covered in Mass High Tech, a new round of funding is expected in the second half of the year.

Launches and product releases

Russian Fast Lane Ventures launches Kommerstate.ru, an online real estate service.

Czech Tripomatic launched an iPhone app to help travelers plan their trips..

Conferences and exhibitions

In Hungary Innovation TechShow will take place on the 6^th of June. Application deadline has been extended until Monday the 14^th of May.

Arctic Startup reminded us that Latitude59 is on June the 7th. I am missing out on both, but attending HackFwd Build and Bitspiration.

Webit conference, which is going to take place on the 10^th and 11^th of October, announced Startup Challenge. For the shortlisted startups the stand at the exhibition will be provided for free. Investors, interested to participate at the challenge, please get in touch with Webit chairman Plamen Russev.

Polish Proseed magazine organizes Intel Business Challenge, the applications deadline is on the 28^th of May.

That’s all for the week. The Second World War Victory Day of the 9th of May has been celebrated across Russia and Ukraine, so not much news on that end. Here in Germany we tend not to discuss the subject.

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