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.
kevin.: Lithuanian start-up raises 65 million US dollars to bring A2A payments to POS terminals
kevin., the Lithuanian fintech start-up providing an advanced A2A (account-to-account) payment infrastructure to replace costly card transactions, this week announced that it has secured 65 million US dollars in Series A funding.
The round was led by Accel, with participation from Eurazeo and all existing investors, including OTB Ventures, Speedinvest, Open Ocean, and Global Paytech Ventures. Additional investors in the round include Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, Ilkka Paananen, CEO and co-founder of Supercell, Amitabh Jhawar, ex-CEO of Venmo, and other angel investors.
The Series A funding comes just six months after the company secured its 10 million US dollars seed round and brings kevin.’s total funding to 77 million US dollars. Since the seed round, the team has now grown to more than 170 employees working from 30 countries and is set to almost double by 2023.
“When you have a game-changing product, time is the most important asset, and our new investor Accel values time just as we do. We have closed a huge round in just two months between the NDA and a signed Investment agreement. We are very happy to work with Accel, and that synergy and looking in the same direction helped deliver such a smooth and fast round closing. We are looking forward to achieving big goals together,” says Pavel Sokolovas, COO and co-founder at kevin.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Vilnius, kevin. has successfully taken advantage of the new opportunities that open banking has brought. The company has a clear mission — to offer innovative and convenient payment solutions that remove unnecessary intermediaries in the payment process. kevin. has already proven itself as the leader in web and in-app A2A payments in the European Economic Area, where it currently has the broadest PSD2 bank API coverage on the market.
Recently, the start-up has also stepped into POS terminal payments in physical stores by introducing the first-ever NFC account-to-account payments solution with a seamless user experience that is comparable to a card payment experience.
Reiterate: Estonian start-up raises 1.25 million euros to launch financial modelling tool for fast-growing businesses
Reiterate, a tech start-up that aims to automate cost and revenue intelligence for transactional businesses has raised 1.25 million euros. The investment round was led by Hummingbird Ventures and included a number of notable private investors, such as the co-founders of Showpad, and former Skype, Pipedrive, Stack Overflow, and Veriff executives.
According to Nikita Andersson, venture capitalist at Hummingbird, “Reiterate addresses a critical but underserved piece of financial infrastructure, revenue and cost management. Despite revenue leakage being a severe pain point for enterprises, the market still lacks innovative solutions that move beyond databases and spreadsheets.”
Founded by an engineering-sales duo that previously built top-selling products at Veriff, Reiterate offers a new generation reconciliation tool for finance, payments, and business intelligence teams. The tool provides a no-code environment for generating automated custom pricing calculations.
According to Forrester, companies lose 10-12 per cent of their total contract value due to contract value leakage every year. Put together, this translates into three trillion US dollars in losses, globally, per year. The majority of contract value leakage occurs due to invoicing errors caused by inability to track pricing terms, manual calculation errors, and poor performance monitoring practices. Billing and cost metering is still largely done through complex spreadsheets or solutions coded by in-house teams, which tend to fail as volumes increase.
The Reiterate tool brings together automated billing, invoice validation, and financial reconciliation in one simple tool that centralises commercial data and eliminates stressful workflows across different teams within a company. The tool helps to visualise complex pricing models and tracks performance to automatically detect charging errors.
The product has witnessed success amongst payment teams for cost optimisation, business intelligence teams to reduce workload, and finance teams to alleviate reporting concerns.
The company’s long-term product vision includes the use of neural networks to analyse agreements, followed by automated analytics to detect payment errors. The new investment will be used to grow its global engineering and product team to further develop the calculation editor, improve client onboarding and grow traction in the UK and across Europe.
“Usage-based pricing is on the rise, as it is better aligned with today’s customer behaviour. At the same time, managing complex pricing models is a challenge for large companies. Our market research has further highlighted the scale of the problem. Reiterate aims to provide a simple solution to eliminate over- and undercharging and help the people caught in these stressful processes,” says Joonatan Samuel, co-founder and CEO of Reiterate.
SoftServe: Ukrainian-founded global tech firm opens development centre in Romani
SoftServe, a global tech company with Ukrainian roots, is entering a new talent region. The company has opened a new office in Bucharest, Romania, as part of its strategy to extend global delivery capabilities and plans to hire more than 350 associates by the end of 2022.
SoftServe is one of the largest IT companies in Eastern Europe, with over 13,000 associates. Founded in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1993, it expanded to Poland and Bulgaria in 2014 and recently opened development centres in Mexico and Colombia.
SoftServe provides healthcare, retail, finance, automotive, manufacturing, energy, and oil industries solutions. The company has built the biggest Big Data and Data Science communities in Eastern Europe with more than two hundred engineers as well as a deep-tech R&D team working on cutting-edge solutions. Among the company’s clients are IBM, Cisco, Deutsche Bank, Cloudera, and many others. SoftServe is also a trusted partner of AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, as well as of Romanian unicorn UI Path.
“During the past few years, SoftServe has been demonstrating significant growth, as the demand for our services is huge on the global market. Our global delivery expansion strategy includes launching in the new talents markets, that’s why we’ve worked on our expansion to Romania for the last six months. We plan to share our expertise with local communities to contribute to the development of the Romanian IT industry and to learn best practices from them too. Romania is one of the top locations for software engineering services, and we are honored to have presence here finally,” says Volodymyr Semenyshyn, president, EMEA, SoftServe.
By 2025, SoftServe intends to have 800+ developers in the country.
“SoftServe is widely recognised as a top employer in the regions of its operations and is well known for its open-minded corporate culture, which is built on the opportunities for professional growth for every employee. The company invests in the self-development and well-being of the employees as well as in growing leadership. We’ve gathered top-notch experts in different fields and we are looking forward to sculpting an inclusive and solid engineering community in our Romanian office,” adds Dan Adrian Paraschiv, SoftServe Romania country manager.
CodeX: Riga to host international hackathon
Riga is set to host CodeX – a weekend-long hacking festival for coders. From Friday June 17 until Sunday 19, the bright new premises of Riga Technical University will become a bustling centre of technology, as developers will get a chance to show off their skills and play around with exciting new technologies.
Eager to make its mark as an exciting destination for new talent, the Riga-based event will offer a fully cost-covered experience for international developers. For the 48h hours, participants will get to enjoy not just the local food and accommodation, but also the opportunity to explore new technologies – ranging from machine learning to multiverse.
Participation in CodeX is free of charge and anyone can apply, including programmers, designers, students, entrepreneurs, and everyone with interest in technology are invited to participate in the event. However, cost-covered spots are limited on a first come, first serve basis – and preference given to participants from a developer background, aiming for a diverse crowd.
The three hackathon days will host challenges based on different industries and themes. Event partner companies, ranging from startups to tech industry leaders, provide their latest tech challenges for hackers to tackle during the weekend. Within a period of 48 hours, CodeX participants will play around with different cutting edge technology offered by partners, from crypto to machine learning.
Hackathon partner Ubiquiti will offer a 5,000 euros cash prize to the best idea created by a team during the event, among other prizes.
“We hope that all the hackathon participants will experience moments of creative joy, have a lot of fun, and still build something innovative and useful. In CodeX, we are all about combining people with different skill sets and backgrounds, but they all have something in common – they want to challenge themselves,” says one of the hackathon organisers, Zane Grēta Grants.
CodeX, a 48h coding festival, will serve as the ground for collaboration, providing a unique opportunity to work and interact with hundreds of developers while supported by experienced mentors and industry experts. The organising team invites participants not only from Latvia but from across Europe to apply – the hackathon will take place simultaneously both virtually and physically, and will be held in English.
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