Karrieremeldung: Ex-Raiffeisen-Manager Solonar unterstützt Fonds von Heinrich Prokop

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Der aus der Puls4-Show „2 Minuten 2 Millionen“ bekannte Startup-Investor Heinrich Prokop hat den Finanzexperten Raimund Solonar für seinen Fonds Clever Clover gewonnen. Solonar unterstützt als Senior Advisor die finanziellen Belange der Portfolio-Unternehmen und wird zudem bei Exitverhandlungen sein Know-how einbringen.

„Raimund Solonar ist ein erfahrener Fonds-Manager der 40 Jahre Wissen in der Finanzwelt mitbringt. Sein internationales Netzwerk wird uns entscheidend beim Fundraising des zweiten Fonds unterstützen, mit dem wir qualifizierten Investoren die Möglichkeit geben, in zukunftsträchtige Unternehmen aus Handel und Fast Moving Consumer Goods zu investieren“, sagt Prokop.

Bankenmanager und politische Karriere
Solonar war zuletzt als Geschäftsführer der CARY Austria GmbH tätig, wo er unter anderem Kunden bei der Strukturierung und Verwaltung von Fonds beriet. Davor war der Wiener als Vorstandsvorsitzender der Raiffeisen Centropa Invest AG tätig, dessen 100 Millionen Euro Centropa Regional Fund in zentraleuropäische Unternehmen sowie in Staats- und Unternehmensanleihen investierte.

Der Top-Manager begann seine Karriere im Wertpapierbereich der Girozentrale, von wo er nach kurzer Tätigkeit bei der Chase Manhattan in New York nach London ging und dort den Wertpapierhandel der Girozentrale aufbaute. Danach betraute ihn die Bank mit dem Aufbau und der Leitung der Girozentrale New York. 1990 wurde er Generalsekretär der ÖVP. Nach seiner politischen Karriere leitete er das gesamte Kreditgeschäft der Girozentrale. Es folgte die Berufung als Vorstandsvorsitzender der M&A Bank und der Aufbau des Auslandsgeschäftes der ÖVAG.

Über Clever Clover
Clever Clover ist eine Venture Capital Firma in Amsterdam und Wien. Das Unternehmen fokussiert auf innovative Ideen und neue Geschäftsmodelle in traditionellen Branchen. Clever Clover hat eine Reihe von Partnerschaften mit innovativen, frühphasigen Unternehmen in den Sektoren Lebensmittel, Reisen, Freizeit und Fertigung geschlossen und unterstützt diese durch Investitionen, Wissen und ein umfassendes Experten-Netzwerk. www.cleverclover.vc

Kevin Spacey at the Bits & Pretzels Founders Festival 2017

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Great news from the largest German start-up conference Bits & Pretzels: Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey comes back to Munich.

The largest German Founders Festival brings together more than 5,000 founders, start-up enthusiasts, investors and key decision-makers from the startup ecosystem, including many top CEOs, as well as the founders of Airbnb, Delivery Hero, Zendesk and many more successful startups. The festival ends with the grand finale at the traditional Munich Oktoberfest.

Last year Kevin Spacey held the opening speech and visited the Oktoberfest. The team is now pleased to announce that Kevin Spacey will return to Munich to attend the Bits & Pretzels Festival.

In addition to his success in the film sector Spacey is an investor in various start-ups and technology companies, and a world-renowned speaker at tech conferences. Among other things, he already inspired the audience of the World Economic Forum in Davos. There he talked about the art of storytelling and its role in the future of technology.

Founders at Forum Alpbach

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This week, Berthold Baurek-Karlic and Fabian Greiler attended for Venionaire the European Forum Alpbach. It is a great opportunity to meet top managers and politicians as well as founders and entrepreneurs in the Tyrolean Alps.

Among others Daniel Horak (CONDA), Markus Raunig and Daniel Cronin (AustrianStartups), Maggie Childs (Metropole), Lisa-Marie Fassl (AAIA), Christoph Richter (Intellyo), Mic Hirschbrich (Updatemi), Bernhard Hauser (oratio),  Thomas Primus (foodnotify), Andreas Tschas, Markus Lang and Anton Schilling (Pioneers), startup journalists and media managers Dejan Jovicevic (DerBrutkasten.com) and Jakob Steinschaden (TrendingTopics.at), as well as investors Nikolaus Futter, Andreas Tomek (European Super Angels Club) and Michael Krammer attended the event.

 

In discussion with corporate managers, we see a lot of interest in the topic of corporate startup engagement. With the ever growing speed of innovation cycles, even the biggest corporations are facing competition from young companies that traditionally would never have been in the position to compete. One strategy for corporates is to work closely with startups and therefore enable access to innovation.

In addition to the official program, the European Forum Alpbach offers a whole range of exciting side events. Verbund Dialog is one example of such a side-event and this year Wolfgang Anzengruber (CEO Verbund), Rainer Seele (CEO OMV) and Franz Kainersdorfer (Member of the Management Board Voestalpine) discussed the future of the energy sector.

It is almost impossible to participate in all events. Alpbach relishes from informal conversations, intensive networking and the overcoming of temporal limitations of everyday life.

 

Our CEO Berthold Baurek-Karlic collected quotes of people about Alpbach on his private blog in German. Check out what our foreign minister Sebastian Kurz, KPMG Partner Andreas Tomek, NEOS founder and leader Matthias Strolz or ÖBB manager Yvonne Pirkner have to say about the Forum: “Stimmen vom Europäischen Forum Alpbach 2017”.

Article Part 2: Comprehend, Sense, Act – The basis concept of AI

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In cooperation with Venionaire Capital, DerBrutkasten.com publishes a four-part article series on the subject of artificial intelligence. We are concentrating on the economic aspects of how AI works to the current research and the future of artificial intelligence.

In the first article we described “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” as the ability of a machine to learn and adapt from its own experience. In this article we want to get deeper in the matter. AI consists of diverse technologies that are the result of a combination of three elements: comprehend, sense and act.

Language Processing and knowledge representation are important for comprehend.  Natural Language Processing (NLP) combines technologies that are able to understand and generate speech in spoken or written form. Knowledge representation helps to communicate knowledge and facilitate subsequent decision-making, for example digital assistants.

Sense includes machine vision, voice recognition and further processing in sensors. This makes it possible to capture, identify, analyze and process the input information from cameras, microphones or other sensors.

Once information is collected through comprehending and sense, the logical third step is action. This is mainly used in industrial robotics, as Amazons show impressively.

These are the three pillars of the artificial intelligence According to Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig machines must also have specific abilities to act as a human being. Known in this context is the Turing Test from 1950, where a human questioner talkes with two unknown conversation partners. One of them is a person, the other one is a machine. If the questioner does not suceed in telling which of them is the machine, the machine wins. This test is now more than half a century old and we are still at the beginning of the development.

 

For the whole article click here.

 

Article Part 1: Economic Growth through Artificial Intelligence

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In cooperation with Venionaire Capital, DerBrutkasten.com publishes a four-part article series on the subject of artificial intelligence.  We are concentrating on the economic aspects of how AI works to the current research and the future of artificial intelligence.

The first part shows the economic growth through artificial intelligence. While most people still associate the terminator with artificial intelligence, it has long become a key technology. Also Austrian Startups in cooperation with the ÖFAI (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) contribute to this growth with Voicebots and Chatbots such as Yodel.io.

The International Data Corporation sees the US market potential for artificial intelligence in three years at approximately 34 billion euros and the contribution to the economic growth only in Germany will be 1.6%. This is an important argument for investors and caused 2016 investments in the amount of 5 billion Euros. Although there is a clear distance between the USA and Europe, the number of completed deals in Europe is rising. For example the largest financing round in 2017 concluded the German company Kreditech with about 138 billion Euros. The amounts of Austrian startups like FRUX, Kiwi Security or Cortical.io are clearly smaller. Sales will increase enormously between 2016 and 2025 even if there are warnings about the current development for example from Elon Musk.

For the whole article click here.

 

Get a 35% discount for EURUS 2017 Private Capital Forum

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The EURUS 2017 is a foremost high-level international private capital forum taking place at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, October 12.

Bringing together leading fund managers, institutional and corporate investors, family offices, top-tier consultants and entrepreneurs from across Europe, the forum (and its venue) offer the perfect milieu for executives to take a step back to evaluate strategies, to exchange critical insights, to explore high-quality, investment opportunities and to forge strategic relationships.

Over 200 delegates and up to 60 speakers from over a dozen countries will shape the forum’s engaging, content-rich agenda, with concurrent sessions running full-day across three key asset classes: private equity, venture capital, real estate.

 

With the special code SPRT17 all ESAC Members and Venionaire Stakeholders get a 35% discount on regular admission:

Click here!

 

Get your Early-Bird Ticket for Bits & Pretzels now with a special Goodie

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 Image: © Dan Taylor/Heisenberg Media.

 

Bits & Pretzels is a 3-day event for founders, startup enthusiasts, investors and business incubators. The festival will take place from September 24– 26, 2017 in Munich. The best-known entrepreneurs from around the world as well as young aspiring entrepreneurs will meet at the event to mingle with like-minded people. Speakers this year include successful digital founders such as Philipp Lahm (Partner at Fanmiles, Founder of Philipp Lahm Holding), Dr. Philipp Kreibohm (Founder & CEO Home24), Ralf Wenzel (Founder & CEO at Foodpanda, Chief Strategy Officer at Delivery Hero), Rolf Schrömgens (CEO & Co-Founder Trivago), Salome Preiswerk (Founder & CEO Whitebox) and Nikita Fahrenholz (Co-Founder & CEO Book a tiger).

To buy your ticket click here, enter the Code PARTNER_NW17 and get your B&P Hoodie for free!

Growth Hacking: Venionaire cooperates with Hackabu

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Building and scaling up a customer base as quickly as possible is vital for every startup. We are proud to announce our new partnership with Hackabu, offering access to excellent services and a high-class pool of international experts in the field of growth hacking at special terms and conditions.

Hackabu is a team of growth hackers with a focus on startups. The company analyses and evaluates the marketing channels of their customers and works out improvement strategies. Their strategies are heavily based on data analysis and experimentation. Hackabu implements new marketing tactics for you and constantly checks them against previous set figures. Through ongoing evaluation and fine tuning, they set the sails of your business towards fast growth. The metrics are provided by competitor analysis (what channels competitors are using successfully), A/B testing, heatmaps, visitor recordings and personal interviews with users of their clients.

„We got to know Hackabu as an international team of pros who perfectly understand what startups really need. We are happy to offer true growth hacking power at special terms and conditions. We make Hackabu services available for all startups accepted by the European Super Angels Club, or invested by one of our partners. We are dedicated to growth and Hackabu is our perfect partner”, says our Berthold Baurek-Karlic, Managing Partner at Venionaire Capital.

 

Pioneers Festival: New VC Fund, New Fintech Accelerator, New Startup Investments

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What a week for the Austrian Startup Ecosystem! In the light of the Pioneers Festival, capital300 announced to start the fundraising for a new venture capital fund with the goal to build the first Austrian unicorn. Raiffeisen Bank International announced its new Fintech Accelerator Program, called Elevator Lab, while the two Austrian Startups Timeular and Yodel.io closed significant financing rounds.

 

New Corporate Startup Engagement

Today, Raiffeisen Bank International announced its new Fintech Accelerator Program “Elevator Lab”, to foster the development of start-ups – in a structured and effective way. The goal is to be the partner of choice for innovations and innovative services in the fintech field in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Elevator Lab is interested in Big Data Analytics, Branch of the Future, Investing and Trading Tech, Payment & Transaction, RegTech and SME Banking. In the initial stage, an internal selection process will be conducted to identify the best startups for further participation in the Elevator Lab. Within the four-month accelerator program, the Elevator Lab will run a proof of concept project with the participants in order to improve their product, to evaluate how to gain traction and how to start to scale internationally (focus on CEE). After the first batch, they will evaluate the potential of a possible further cooperation together with the startups. Therefore, the accelerator program has the potential to be a stepping stone to reach a significant new market via the extensive network of Raiffeisen Bank International.

Check out the details here.

 

New Venture Capital Fund

Yesterday, the fund manager of capital300, Roman Scharf (previously founder of Jajah) and Peter Lasinger (previously at aws Gründerfonds) announced, that they are going to raise a new Venture Capital Fund for creating the first Austrian Unicorn. The target size of the first closing is 20 Million Euros with a final fund size of 40-60 Million Euro. Capital300 is backed by the Business Angel network startup300.

 

New Investments

On the same day, we announced the first investment of our European Super Angels Club. Yodel.io got a 500k investment from experienced international investors, pushing the development of their business even further. The startup Timeluar closed a fantastic one million financing round, led by the VC firm Speedinvest.

This great news will hopefully help to get even more international attention on the Austrian Startup Ecosystem, as there is still a huge gap regarding startup financing between the US and Europe and also within Europe between well-established hubs such as London or Berlin and other regions. The next event matching an international investment crowd with Austrian startups is the Business Angel Summit in Tyrol – we are really looking forward to this event!

 

 

Verbund and OMV join forces for E-Mobility Infrastructure

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Austrias leading charging network and charge-point-operator, a former joint venture of Siemens Austria and Verbund AG, welcomes a new strong partner: OMV. The international oil and gas company joins forces with the previous shareholders to enable further growth of e-mobility in Austria by providing necessary infrastructure and related services. OMV takes over a significant stake (40%) in SMATRICS. Austria has established many local e-charging infrastructure providers, but only SMATRICS provides an established nationwide network of fast and standard charging stations. SMATRICS has also been a strong partner for European e-mobility projects, connecting all neighbouring countries through fast-charging stations, well positioned on major highway routes. SMATRICS is the perfect investment into modern mobility and adds e-electricity to the fossil-fuel mix of the current gas-station network. Venionaire advised Verbund AG and SMATRICS in terms of a solid setup for this M&A process over the past two years and has enjoyed working closely for the future of mobility infrastructure. “We are confident that the current setup and business model will accelerate e-mobility adoption in Austria”, explains Berthold Baurek-Karlic, Managing Partner (CEO) of Venionaire Capital.

 

Manfred Leitner, executive board member at OMV, emphasized the customer benefit through an additional alternative mobility service, while Wolfgang Anzengruber, CEO at Verbund, highlighted the “strategic long-term cooperation between the two largest Austrian energy companies”. SMATRICS Managing Director Viktor Fischer sees now the opportunity for becoming the Austrian market leader for electric charging infrastructure. So far, Verbund held 86% and Siemens 14% on Smatrics. With the entry of OMV (40 percent), Verbund and Siemens are sharing the rest according to current proportions.

The global trend of a significant transformation throughout all industries and value chains with notable impact on costumer behaviour, as well as challenges for corporate cultures, has arrived in Europe. We are proud to be among the very few specialists for Venture Capital, Corporate Startup Engagement (CSE) and M&A services, with a reference of more than 20 large corporate clients served within the last 4 years.

Picture: © Smatrics

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