Delivered warm and steamy like a cup of cappuccino, The Recursive’s weekly round-up is at your service with the hottest news in the startup ecosystem and a sprinkled SEE flavor.
#1 Greek founded TileDB secures investment from Verizon Ventures
• TileDB has received a strategic investment from Verizon Ventures, the venture arm of Verizon – one of the biggest American wireless network operators.
• The Greek company is now headquartered in the US and provides a universal data engine that allows people to access, analyze, and share any complex data with any tool. TileDB provides a database that focuses on universal storage and data management rather than the compute layer.
• The funding will be used to accelerate the development of advanced features of the TileDB universal database and to scale go-to-market functions.
“At TileDB, we set out to debunk the myth around performance optimization in purpose-built data solutions,” said Stavros Papadopoulos, TileDB Founder and CEO in the press release. “Data management concepts are common to all domains, yet the market is flooded with special-purpose products that excel only under the most ideal conditions. In the last two years, we proved that it is possible to achieve both universality and price-performance superiority over purpose-built solutions.”
#2 SenseTask raises €215K in seed funding
- Romanian startup SenseTask has raised a seed funding round of €215,000 from a Romanian entrepreneur and business angel.
- SenseTask has developed a cloud artificial intelligence platform that automatically extracts relevant content from documents like invoices, purchase orders, and forms in order to automate manual document processing workflows.
- The company will use the investment to scale up the smart document processing for their customers in industries such as financial, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, legal, and transportation.
#3 Fintech startup with Croatian DNA Minka has raised $24 million
- Fintech Minka has secured $24 million in a funding round co-led by Tiger Global Management and Kaszek.
- The Croatian-founded, Bogota-based payments infrastructure startup provides full banking-as-a-service platform that manages digital identity, digital banking channels, and blockchain-based transactional core. Minka develops projects that make life easier for those who have it hard – the underbanked and SMB in Latin America. The team is building a new payments network for cash-based economies in order to enable money to flow as easily as information does.
- Currently, nearly two million people use the project to send money using only a phone number. Minka has 20 financial institutions and fintechs directly connected to its platform, with another 20 in the process of integration, the CEO and co-founder Domagoj Rozic shared with TechCrunch.
#4 Bulgarian startup CloudCart wins the Podim Pitching Competition 2022
- Chosen among 800 companies, the Bulgarian startup CloudCart has won the Pitching Competition at Podim 2022 – one of the most influential startup and tech events in the CEE region, organized in Slovenia.
- CloudCart makes it easy to create a successful online store. Their platform lets you create and launch an online store in no time. They address both small and medium businesses and have everything you need to sell online.
- CloudCart has an impressive track record for 2021: over 9,000 registered stores, more than 2.6 million orders and approximately160 million euros turnover realized in the stores using the platform. Their latest data shows a 65% annual revenue growth and a 20% increase in the conversion rate of their clients’ stores compared to 2020.
#5 SeedBlink participates in DRUID’s Series A round
- SeedBlink has announced participation in DRUID’s Series A round, providing access to its community of private investors. The round is also backed by a high-profile group of international VCs and investors led by Karma Ventures and Hoxton Ventures.
- DRUID is an end-to-end platform for building AI-driven conversational business applications, designed to deliver next-level employee productivity and a complete customer experience in the most intuitive way. Started in 2018, DRUID actively builds on its vision to provide each employee with an intelligent virtual assistant, establishing an extensive 130+ partner network, most notably with UiPath, and servicing 100+ clients from around the world.
- SeedBlink is the fastest growing investing platform specialized in sourcing, vetting, financing, and scaling European tech start-ups. Their vision is to shape Europe’s tech future by creating an investment platform that allows investors and founders to access the opportunities, tools, and services of early-stage venture capital.
