Only in January this year I have covered the story about German VC Earlybird’s launch of its 130 million Euro Digital East Fund focusing on Turkey and CEE markets. Three months after the launch the fund reports what has been done so far.
Digital East has made three investments – Flipps, Tjobs and Metrekare.com having reviewed 2000 investment opportunities over the past two years.
Originally from Bulgaria, Flipps is a smart phone app that allows streaming video content from the app directly onto the smart TVs. It works with over 5000 manufacturers’ models and has 10 million registered users. The startup raised the total of $2,4 million from Earlybird and Tim Draper.
Romanian TJobs is a job portal that helps European businesses find temporary and permanent employees across Central and Eastern Europe. The company boasts 2 million candidates and 700+ recruitment agencies. It has presence in France, Germany and the UK. Although TJobs has been around for the few years, with the removal of the working visa requirements for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens, it has discovered a new business opportunity helping blue-collar workers from the CEE region find temporary work.
According to the partner of Earlybird Digital East Cem Sertoglu, the TJobs revenue comes from the Western European employers currently from France, Germany and the UK where TJobs has offices. In the future it plans to offer recruitment services in all European countries.
Turkish Metrekare is an online real estate listing portal, that has brought together over 2500 realtors in its first year, that posted 100,000 listings to one million monthly visitors. There are existing players on this segment, but according to Sertoglu, Metrekare is well-positioned to leverage technology and data to become the leader on the real estate listing in Turkey.
The fund team sees 80 percent of all startup investment opportunities in Turkey and CEE. As Earlybirds collaborates with the local business angels, your best bet would be to approach one of them to be introduced to the fund.
