Boasting world-famous coffee shop culture, incredibly rich cultural heritage, and beautiful landscapes, Austria is a hub of inspiration and innovation. The Alpine nation has historically been at the intersection of European activity and is a trendsetter when it comes to innovation.
A strongly industrialized nation with a strategic location in terms of research, development and experimentation thanks to its excellent network of universities, government support and large companies, it’s a country with the core elements of a startup hub. One of Europe’s most active VCs, Speedinvest, is headquartered in Vienna and the country’s vibrant student community provides plenty of fresh, motivated talent. According to the most recent data, a total of 2,600 startups were founded in Austria over the past 12 years, half of them based in Vienna. The sector employs 20,000 people
Austria is also paving the way for more inclusive startup ecosystem – in 2019, it was reported that 35% of startups had at least one female founder. It’s a trend continuing to grow, and Austria (particularly Vienna) is now regarded as one of the most forward-thinking startup locations when it comes to gender parity.
2021 was a year of great growth for this ecosystem, in fact, it brought record investments of more than €1.2 billion for Austrian startups. Among them, there was the round that defined the first Austrian Unicorns (Bitpanda and Gostudent). Exciting soonicorns include TTTech and Tricentis.
To highlight the exciting new growth in Austria, we’ve compiled a list of some of the hottest startups coming out of Austria (all founded post-2019) to keep an eye on this year.
Trality: Founded in 2019, Trality has created a platform for anyone to create and invest through automated trading bots. The Vienna-based startup states that +80% of private traders lose money due to emotional bias and lack of automation, while professional traders are meanwhile using automated trading. Trying to level the playing field, their platform is available for traders of all levels of experience. The team has secured four rounds of funding, totalling around €4.1 million.
Revo Foods: Founded in Vienna in 2021, This innovative alternative protein startup is trying to bring about a new perspective to fish consumption, offering seafood made 100% out of plants. Aiming to change the way people consume fish products, the vision is to offer delicious plant-based seafood alternatives to those who want to keep our oceans healthy and full of fish. Given the overfishing problem facing our oceans on a global level, combined with rising plastic levels in the ocean, this startup is bringing a much healthier concept to seafood. At the end of 2021, the young company expanded to bring its products to Germany, Denmark and Spain. We recently mentioned this fast-growing startup as one of the most Vienna-based companies as well as one of the startups shaking up the Europen FoodTech space. So far, the team has raised a total amount of €4 million.
Shopstory: Founded in 2020, Shopstory operates with the vision of creating an ecommerce market that is more transparent and fair. Its SaaS solution acts like an intelligent performance marketing assistant for online retailers, using AI to help brands increase sales, profitability, visibility and overall competitiveness. The tool also monitors competitors, provides input for campaigns and blog posts, automates keyword research, and provides shop owners with intuitive performance reports. ShopStory has collected a total amount of €2.6 million with the latest round in September 2022 of €2.2 million.
Arkeon Biotechnologies: This Vienna-based startup is on a mission to create the most sustainable, nutritious and ethical food system, turning CO2 into food. Arkeon is the first companies in the world to leverage the technology of gas fermentation with the power of archaea, an ancient microorganism with unique properties, for food applications. The company’s proprietary technology produces all 20 amino acids for the human diet in one production step. The foodtech startup holds the key to unlocking a food system without resource constraints, without geographical restrictions, and free from animal suffering. It has collected a total amount of €6.5 million in one round
Jentis: Vienna-based Jentis has developed a powerful server-side tracking tool that helps businesses extract complete, accurate, and consistent raw data to accelerate their growth. The technology makes it easy to collect user data in a GDPR-compliant manner. With Jentis’ server-side tracking, it’s possible to overcome the consequence of deleted cookies and broken data collection – also from ad blockers. Jentis was elected as one of the EIT Digital Challenge winners in June 2022 and has raised a total of €4.5 million.
DeepOpinion: This Austrian startup is a No-Code B2B SaaS platform empowering every business user to create their own automation applications. With their API-first approach, they integrate seamlessly into customers’ existing software stack, ensuring the smooth automation of cognitive processes in the existing work environment. DeepOpinion provides multiple deployment options, ranging from cloud-SaaS, private cloud, and hybrid set-ups to on-premise solutions. It was founded in 2019 and has raised a total amount of €565k.
enspired: Founded in 2020, enspired is on a mission to enable a full transition to clean energy by providing power grids with much-needed flexibility. With its AI-based trading services, enspired commercially optimizes power generation, storage, and consumption assets on so-called “spot markets” – short-term power exchanges that help to balance supply and demand. This Trading-as-a-Service platform promises to be the most profitable way for its clients to trade flexibly. Since its founding year, it has raised a total amount of €7.5 million.
Froots.io: This Vienna-based fintech startup is an online wealth manager that helps its consumers to afford things that are considered not affordable. Whether they aspire to early retirement or a top education for their children, froots help them to achieve their financial goals by tailoring a goal based. This innovative startup was founded in 2020 and has raised a total amount of €3.3 million so far.
Sarcura: Sarcura is an innovative biotech startup based in Klosterneuburg that is revolutionizing the manufacturing of cell therapy. Sarcura aims at building the next-generation machine platform for the manufacturing of personalized cell therapies in order to save lives and treat specific cancers. Founded in 2019 it has raised a total amount of €9.5 million in funding. The latest funding round closed in November 2022.
Soma Reality: Vienna-based Soma Reality is a Digital Healthcare startup that aims at understanding human behaviours in virtual environments. By doing so, Soma Reality will empower the next-generation healthcare applications making them more personalized and aware. They develop sensor-based digital biomarkers in Virtual Reality in order to offer deep insight into their users. It was founded in 2019 and has raised a total amount of €1.5 million.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
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