Emerging Europe’s start-up scene is thriving: new money and new ideas are coming onto the market all the time. To keep you up to date with the latest investments, innovations, movers and shakers, each Monday Emerging Europe brings you a round-up of the region’s start-up news.
Fonoa: Croatian tax automation start-up raises 60 million US dollars in Series B
Croatian start-up Fonoa has raised 60 million US dollars in a Series B round to enable it to expand its global tax solutions. The round was led by Coatue include Dawn Capital, Index Ventures, OMERS Ventures, FJ Labs, Moving Capital.
The funding, which comes just six months after a 20 million US dollars Series A round, underlines the success the firm has had in transforming the way digital companies including Uber, Zoom, Booking.com, Spotify, Teachable and Remote.com stay tax compliant.
The Fonoa platform is the first digital tax solution with global coverage, providing a plug-and-play modular platform that helps businesses convert a costly and complex process into an automatic and seamless one. Using a simple API solution, Fonoa determines and calculates the right amount of tax a business should pay, in the right place, at the right time. This results in greater profitability for customers who can reduce their operating costs and increase their tax compliance at the same time.
Fonoa was founded by three Uber alumni – Davor Tremac, Filip Sturman, Ivan Ivankovic – who experienced first-hand how difficult it is to correctly calculate and report taxes to authorities throughout the world. The existing crop of tax software solutions have not been built for the digital age and require clients to bring on armies of implementation consultants on projects that could take many months to complete.
“As we’ve grown as a business we’ve seen a number of companies wishing to reduce the cost of their operations and improve profitability when it comes to managing their indirect taxes,” says Tremac.
“Fonoa is the only tax software solution built for the digital age.”
Solarstone: Solar roofing start-up raises 10 million euros
Estonian solar roofing start-up Solarstone has raised 10 million euros to expand its integrated solar PV solutions business across Europe and beyond.
Leading the round was Biofuel OÜ – an asset management company focusing on environmentally friendly wood refining, and sustainable forest management, with a clear focus on sustainable energy management and production.
According to Silver Aednik, co-founder and CEO of Solarstone, “energy production and consumption patterns are undergoing a major shift, with prosumer-generated capacities balancing the shortcomings of centralised energy generation.”
“The shift has led many to look towards adding their production capacity to where they live. Solarstone’s technology removes all barriers to making it happen as it makes it profitable, beautiful and climate conscious of adding solar directly to where they live,” adds Aednik.
The investment will enable Solarstone to upgrade production and develop teams in Estonia and other strategic markets. The company is actively recruiting proptech experts to grow private and business segments.
In addition, Solarstone is investing in software solutions that empower stakeholders in the construction industry to design and procure solar power plants more effectively.
RedTrack: Post-cookie ad tracking start-up raises 750,000 US dollars
Vilnius-based RedTrack, an ad tracking and conversion attribution solution, has raised a total of 750,000 US dollars in a funding round led by Presto VC and supported by both IronWolfCapital and Flyer One Ventures.
“After diving deeper into the post-cookie landscape, we realised that RedTrack.io is in a prime position to thrive in this environment from a combination of a very experienced team and a great product that can be continuously improved with the further backing of investment that we are happy to provide,” says Roman Novacek, partner at Presto Ventures.
RedTrack.io is a SaaS, privacy-first platform that provides marketers with real-time data, insights, alerts, and automation to maximise the return on ad spend, capture the customer journey and evaluate marketing performance across all digital channels.
By leveraging first-party data and machine learning, businesses can analyse the performance of advertising campaigns in more detail and turn data into insights and actions.
Following its in 2018, RedTrack.io is already used by more than 500 customers from the US, Canada, and Europe. The company was created by Vlad Zhovtenko, Artem Shpakov and Vladimir Vassilevski – three industry pioneer veterans with more than 50 years of joint experience in digital marketing, highload/big data systems and finance/VC between them.
‘’The digital marketing industry is currently experiencing a paradigm shift,” says Zhovtenko, RedTrack.io’s CEO. “We created RedTrack.io to help businesses get the most accurate data and analytical reports to achieve ambitious goals without wasting time and effort.”
The team is currently focused on creating marketing data that focuses on CDP on top of RedTrack.io functionality to provide customers with insights not only into their own channel performance but also their customer journey patterns and LTV expectations.
The primary goal is to quadruple the number of users by 2023.
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