What do the results of the survey say about Business Angels in the Czech Republic?
Although angel investing is not yet widespread in the Czech Republic, Czechs are still among the most skilled investors in startups. Their strategies have generally been successful so far. Almost nine out of ten investors were able to make a profit on their investment, with nearly 12% making more than ten times their investment. Two-fifths of investors consider investing in startups more profitable than other forms of investment. These are the findings of a survey conducted by investment group DEPO Ventures, which is building a unique syndicate of angel investors in addition to angel funds. The survey was also conducted in partnership with the law firm Havel & Partners and the agency CzechInvest. The aim of this fourth annual survey was to map the environment of angel investing in the Czech Republic.
DEPO Latest News | October 2022
As we approach the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to thank all our investors, co-investors, partners, founders and others for your support and engagement. It has been an exciting and eventful year for DEPO. We have achieved many milestones and reached some important goals with 12 investments as DEPO Ventures and 7 syndicates as DEPO Angels. We continue and aim higher with the third €20 million fund for another 40 early-stage startups from the CEE region and Baltics. Take a look at our investments for the last quarter.
Tapline, a digital finance platform has announced a pre-seed funding of €31.7 million euro
Fasanara Capital, the UK-based alternative asset management company, is providing debt funding of €30m. The €1.7m equity round is led by the Czech VC firm, V-Sharp Venture Studio, alongside Antler, Black Pearls VC, 365 fintech, Depo Ventures, Impetus Capital, and several business angels investing in the round. The funding will allow the Berlin-based team to tap into the exponentially growing SaaS market, where global transaction volumes are set to reach €720 billion in 2028. The investment will also be used to enhance the Tapline solution and hire key individuals around marketing and product.
Tatum receives $41.5 million funding to growth of a unique blockchain development platform
Tatum, the company drastically simplifying blockchain applications development, today announced it has received $41.5 million in funding to accelerate marketing, educational efforts, and community building for slashing the complexity and time-to-market of creating blockchain-based applications critical to digital finance and Web 3.0. The investment augments the company’s previous financing and includes Evolution Equity Partners as lead, as well as Octopus Ventures, 3VC, Tensor Ventures, Depo Ventures, Leadblock Fund, Circle, and the founders of Bitpanda.
DEPO Ventures opens the largest angel fund in the CEE region
There is a huge amount of money in the startup world. Investments are often made in millions of euros, and the value of companies can quickly exceed a number 20 times larger. Before technology startup founders can get to this stage, they need a large amount of investment capital, which they have trouble getting from investors in the early stages. The investment group DEPO Ventures is now launching its third angel fund, one of the few to focus on investing in early-stage startups. It wants to bring together angel investors who can help startup founders further their development. At the same time, allow them to invest in a much more systematic way. The new fund will become the largest angel fund in Central Europe.
DEPO Ventures invests in data automation. Swedish-Czech startup Forloop raised 875k euros.
No successful company today can do without rapid adaptation to the constantly changing market conditions. Finding out the behavior of the target group, new trends, and competitors, all of this can be crucial for the further development of a company. The problem with data is that its processing is often very slow, difficult, and most importantly manual. In addition, many companies do not use this additional data at all and rely only on their internal data. To handle this problem, the Czech-Swedish startup Forloop.ai has created a platform to automate work with external data, which has been proven to speed up the work of data analysts while generally saving time and resources. The startup has now raised around 875 thousand EUR from Czech and foreign investors, including the angel fund DEPO Ventures. The funding will be used to improve the product, grow the number of users and expand into the US.
Tatum, StartupYard and DEPO Ventures are launching a unique acceleration program
App development for blockchain-based tech is often long and tedious. The founders are often unaware of how exactly to continue with their project in order to make monetary gains from it. Seeing this issue, the developer platform Tatum joined forces with the startup accelerator StartupYard launching the unique Tatum Blockchain Accelerator. The program is built in a way to enable founders to easy development of their company from scratch. What do the founders get out of the service besides that? All-year acceleration includes investment, mentoring from experienced experts, access to the Tatum platform, and contacts from the blockchain and web3 world.
The Baltic region is a digital Mecca for startups. Czechia has something to learn.
Czech people often overlook the Baltic countries. About six million people live in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. It might seem they don‘t have much to offer in the European context. At least in the field of technology startups, however, this is not the case at all. As my colleagues from DEPO Ventures and I have seen during our visits in recent months, the Baltic States are a mecca for the modern startup business. How did they achieve this? And what could we learn from them and apply in the Czech Republic?
Rozhovor se Švýcarskou investiční platformou Verve Ventures a jejím vstupu na český trh
Švýcarská investiční platforma Verve Ventures otevírá dveře českým investorům. Ti se budou moci podílet na financování startupů, do nichž zpravidla vstupují jen velké fondy. Přečtěte si rozhovor s Chrisem Gay-Crosierem, vedoucím pro mezinárodní investování, o expanzi na český trh, současné situaci i o jejich úspěších.
The end of job dissatisfaction. DEPO Ventures invests in a startup that completely changes job searc
Most often people resign at work due to unsatisfactory corporate culture. However, companies often do not examine the match between the needs of employees and their direction during recruitment. Startup Supertalent wants to change that. It will help people looking for work to find the company that best suits them. The company has now received two and a half million Czech crowns from DEPO Ventures. The Central European startup accelerator StartupYard also invested in the startup. The current investment round is not closed yet, other investors from Europe and the USA are in play.