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, events and accelerators, every week Emerging Europe brings you a round-up of the region’s start-up and tech news.
Romanian people intelligence platform Nestor raises two million US dollars to fuel expansion
Romanian start-up Nestor, a people intelligence platform, this week announced a seed round raise of two million US dollars, led by Eleven Ventures with the participation of Underline Ventures and angel investors from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nestor’s solution brings together employee engagement, performance management, and development planning with a skills-based approach and use predictive analytics and nudging automation to help organisations develop and retain talent in the new hybrid world.
It links skills to the most important talent operations by creating a unified skills-based profile to enable employees to forge new career paths or make lateral moves inside an organisation according to their interests and business needs.
“Every employee is unique,” says Bogdan Apostol, Nestor’s CEO. “We envision a world where every employee receives the right opportunity at the right time to continually learn and improve the skills that will help them succeed. We help organisations make an impact on each employee’s development and enable HR people leaders to build agile people strategies that move beyond the traditional job approach by placing skills at the front and centre of their talent operations.”
Nestor says that the funding round will enable it to grow its sales and customer success teams and accelerate expansion on the newly entered US and Latin America markets with a focus on mid-to-large enterprises.
“Bogdan and his team are reimagining the multi-billion dollar people analytics and talent software market by offering workforce visibility over non-linear assets such as employee skills and capabilities, engagement, performance, culture, and career mobility in an effortless and codified way,” adds Vassil Terziev, managing partner at Eleven Ventures. “We are thrilled to join Nestor’s journey to deliver an end-to-end people intelligence platform to support organisations worldwide.”
EIF puts 50 million euros into climate tech VC fund
The European Investment Fund (EIF) this week announced that it is investing – with support of the InvestEU programme – 50 million euros into the climate tech venture capital (VC) fund World Fund, joining more than 200 investors including PwC Germany, Ecosia, and the UK Environment Agency’s pension fund in supporting the next generation of climate tech companies.
It is one of the largest investments EIF has made into a first-time VC fund.
The investment is part of the EIF’s mission to support high-growth and innovative Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) across Europe, as well as to ensure at least 16 per cent of its activity is in climate and environment-related projects in 2022 with the goal to increase to 25 per cent by 2024.
Founded in 2021, World Fund is Europe’s leading climate tech VC fund. It invests in start-ups that have the potential to save at least 100 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year and tackle the most pressing issue of our time. Climate tech is one of the fastest-growing areas of European tech.
World Fund’s strict criteria for investment aims to back companies using technology to directly reduce emissions not only to help achieve the world’s climate goals faster. In order to find these start-ups, World Fund’s team of experts has devised with the climate performance potential (CPP) assessment to gauge a start-up’s ability to assist in the fund’s goal of reducing emissions.
“The climate tech VC market in Europe is in its infancy, and World Fund stands out as a fund with a strong track record, network, investment hypothesis and experience, as well as scientific and commercial expertise within its founding team,” says EIF CEO Alain Godard.
“These factors, alongside World Fund’s climate performance potential measurement criteria, have convinced us to back their first fund, with the support of the European Commission and we look forward to supporting the next generation of high-growth climate start-ups across the continent.”
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