Romanian Startup Ecosystem Radar (27 March – 02 April 2023)

🚀 From our side

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Venture capital, M&A and funding-related news

1. Videowise, the video marketing platform for e-commerce brands founded in 2021 by product designer Claudiu Cioba, announced a $3M funding round from major investment funds (Slack Fund, FounderCollective, Underline Ventures, Mu Ventures and Ratio Ventures) and strategic investors to expand the platform’s capabilities by transforming in an omnichannel online shopping experience through video marketing (link).

2. Finverity, trade and supply chain startup co-founded by Alex Fenechiu in the UK, has announced a $5M investment round from venture capital funds Outward VC, Acrobator Ventures, s16vc, B&Y Venture Partners and other private investors (link).

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News related to programs and events

3. Investment fund and business accelerator Startup Wise Guys is launching an international program for high school and college students called Young Entrepreneurs aimed at young people interested in entrepreneurship (link).

4. The Bucharest Stock Exchange kicks off the 6th edition of Made in Romania, a program dedicated to Romanian entrepreneurial companies. The nomination of companies in the Made in Romania program takes place between March 29-31 (link).

5. start-up.ro is organizing the Smart Future event on April 25, which wants to be a map of innovation initiatives and a guide for how technology changes Romania in the next year (link).

6. 28 teams from Cluj and Timișoara join the 49 from Bucharest and Iași following the hackathons that took place last weekend. Together, these teams will participate in the Innovation Labs mentoring program, which will run over the next 10 weeks (link).

Various news related to startups

7. tranzy.ai provides Romanian public transport operators with a platform that automates a large part of the daily planning and operating activities for hundreds of vehicles and resources involved in passenger transport in 3 cities in Romania, plus Chisinau, Republic of Moldova (link).

8. The Romanian company Aliant, IT integrator and provider of digital business transformation services, has concluded a partnership with KFactory, a startup specialized in the development and marketing of Industry 4.0 digital solutions for the production vertical. As part of this collaboration, Aliant will be able to incorporate these technologies into the solutions offered to its customers with production activities (link).

9. start-up.ro announced the launch of the production for the first documentary dedicated to the startup ecosystem in Romania, and 2Performant, the first local technology business listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, joins as a partner of the production (link).

Other news in the ecosystem

10. Glovo, one of the world’s leading multi-category apps, launches the Impact Fund. Within this fund, a small portion of Glovo’s proceeds from each order will be dedicated to supporting Impact and Sustainability projects (link).

11. The Launch community, which supports startups and early stage startup founders in Romania, recently launched the report The State Of Romanian-Born Early Stage Startups. The report brings to the surface all the details that are the basis of building an early-stage startup, according to the answers of the Romanian founders (link).

12. Orange opened in Iași the second 5G laboratory in Romania, a technological hub dedicated especially to the automotive sector, where the academic environment, startups and companies from the region of Moldova can innovate and test solutions based on 5G technology (link).

13. Banca Comercială Română enters into a partnership with Banqup, an administration and invoicing software platform for entrepreneurs. Thus, entrepreneurs and SMEs can now manage financial documents much more efficiently (link).

14. Vodafone and Microsoft entered into a partnership with the aim of accelerating the digitization of the public and private sectors in Romania. The two companies will cooperate for the development of digitization, research, innovation and social responsibility programs (link).