The top deals in Central and Eastern Europe in March

Here is my list of some interesting deals from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in March. Often overlooked by big US and Western European investors, the region offers many top deals at much cheaper valuations compared to the US market.

Russian billionaire and Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich continues to invest in Israeli startups; through Millhouse Capital, his investment company, he has led a $2.25 million investment in equity crowdfunding platform iAngels, a company started by entrepreneurs Mor Assia and Shelly Hod-Moyal. They founded iAngels in early 2014, and developed a model for investment of small amounts in startups, based on experienced investors. The company has raised several hundred thousand dollars in the past, with the new investment making a total of $2.6 million raised by the company to date.

Deutsche Telekom has invested €8 million via its incubator hub raum in the Polish company KoalaMetrics. The company helps Telecoms and m-commerce platforms better understand clients, by identifying users’ psychographic profiles based on their smartphone usage. By combining thousands of data points about cross app usage, KoalaMetrics reaches a 93.7% accuracy rate in predicting user interests, behaviour and intents. These outcomes give marketers an extensive and thorough understanding of consumers, offering a new way to customise the offer and improve customer experience.

MVP Academy, a satellite-programme from the ‘How To Web’ tech conference from Bucharest, has selected 13 cool projects for its 7-week acceleration programme. Most of the finalists this year have founded other companies before (either failed startups or service companies), or have in their teams tech professionals with a long track record.

Leading CEE investors have shared their views on what will be hot in 2015, making a good read indeed. Slovak Neulogy Ventures says: “In the past two or three years, the number of accelerators and seed funds sprang up in the region. As a result, many more startups received seed funding and thus we will see many more Series A funding rounds in this region, but also many more spectacular failures and quiet deaths”. I see high demand from startups, however, there are not so many regional later stage funds.

The leading Czech business accelerator StartupYard launched its 2015 Accelerator round. So far 7 companies, 6 of them from the Czech Republic, have completed nearly a month of intensive mentoring, and are ready to go. It’s worth checking them out!

Moscow-based venture funds Leta Capital and Simile Venture Partners have invested $3.2 milllion in fintech big data startup Double Data. Until now, the company had been bootstrapping. Founded in 2012, Double Data targets banks and other financial institutions who need to improve their performance for a variety of processes, from customer acquisition and assessment, to debt collection. The Double Data software combines big data analysis tools, computer-aided learning methods and data mining. The company claims to have implemented more than 100 projects over the past two years, involving banks – including Home Credit Bank, Alfa Bank and Tinkoff Bank – international financial institutions as well as credit history and debt collection agencies. Double Data is a resident company of Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow.

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