When we talk in Austria about innovation and startups, we almost always reference to Silicon Valley, London or Berlin. However, the startup ecoystem is gathering speed in other parts of the world as well. Take Iran as an example. The oil rich country is still struggling with economic growth, but on the plus side Iran has a highly educated and young population, hungry for success and in high demand for new products and services.

 

Visit to Teheran
Therefore we were more than happy to accept the invitation to the 1st International Marketing Conference on knowledge-based industries in Teheran, which took place last week. The conference was held by the Iranian Marketing Research Association (IMRA) and Innovative Consultants in cooperation with the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR), the Iran Vice-Presidency for Science and Technology and the Center for Innovation and Technology Cooperation of Iran Presidency (CITC) with the aim of transferring marketing knowledge to knowledge-based companies and promoting the necessity of market research. Our partners Alexander Rapatz and Sasan Hashemi attended the conference, with Alexander holding a keynote about venture capital investments as a go-to-market approach. On the following panel discussion he was joined by Sasan, Farhad Rasouli from the Danish platform Venture Cup and Dr. Amir Albadvi, Faculty member at the Tarbiat Modares University. The conference was co-hosted by Pirooz Malekzadeh, CEO of Innovate Consultants and Board Member of Iran Marketing Research Association, who also organized and supported Venionaire in attending side-events, such as visits to the PARDIS Technology Park and the FINEX 2016  – Iran Exhibition of Bank, Exchange & Insurance.

 

Big market with high potential
Iran may not be the first destination investors would think of when it comes to startups, but its track record is huge. Iran is one of the world’s biggest emerging markets and the startup and venture capital ecosystem is growing fast. 120-130 Million people are talking Farsi, with borders to huge and untapped countries in the Middle East and Asia. Therefore it is definitely worthwhile to keep an eye on this region.

 

Pictures provided by Innovate Consultants / Alexander Rapatz

 

On Monday, purchased.at launched its new online payment platform at the tech fair Money 20/20 Europe. The idea is to enable easy and cost efficient integration of professional payment methods for online shops specialized on digital goods.

 

purchased.at currently enables access to 200+ online and mobile payment methods and is constantly expanding its portfolio. This includes popular payment methods such as eps, Mastercard, Visa or paysafecard. Starting immediately, companies of all sizes can use purchased.at to market digital products and services worldwide and gain access to new markets. A simple technical integration (API) makes this possible within just a few hours. Online shop operators need only choose which payment methods and currencies they wish to offer. The platform then takes care of time- and cost-intensive issues such as country-specific taxation rates (e.g.: EU tax regulations) or payment support. The multilingual support team answers all customer queries seven days a week. An optimized user experience and user-friendly checkout process further encourages a high conversion rate.

The platform removes the usual hurdles and obstacles global payment processing involves. With the push of a button, additional statistics, reports and business-relevant figures can be recalled. Moreover, payment processes are protected by an ingenious “fraud prevention system” that interdicts payment fraud. Usage is free of advertising and waives any and all setup or monthly fees. For the duration of their service use, online shop providers are merely charged a small platform fee and reasonable rates of the chosen payment methods.

Strong partners in the background. The payment platform was jointly founded by the Austrian IT service provider IXOLIT and the American payment company Skol LLC. Wishing to rapidly expand internationally with purchased.at, growth is driven by an experienced developer team and a six-figure seed investment.

 

Venionaire is proud to support this startup in matters of PR.

Find out more on www.purchased.at.

 

„Banks and insurance companies will die a death of thousand cuts”, said Martin Hauge in his keynote at the first Up Venture Conference in Vienna.  The Creandum board member and new partner at Fluent Digital Capital (Fund of Fund under establishment) was referring to the raise of fintech companies and how they are changing the financial industries.

Serial Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist Martin Hauge

Game changing ventures and how to finance them was naturally a dominant topic at the first Up Venture Conference in Vienna last Friday. Aim of the conference is to connect LPs and GPs from the Western and Eastern VC Ecosystem, and the organiser surely succeeded. Venture Experts such as Nikolas Samios (General Partner at German Startups Group), Peter Schwanitz (Portfolio Advisors), Speedinvest CEO Oliver Holle, Michael Gastauer (Founder & President Gastauer Family Office) and many more attended the event. The team of DealMatrix, led by Christoph Drescher, had some highly interesting conversations while introducing their SaaS solution for venture capital, startup events and investors.

The Conference was organized by Rubixlab, a Slovakian accelerator and incubator and they already announced to repeat the event next year. There is good news for Austrian Startups as well: Rubixlab is thinking about opening a new office in Austria – a warm welcome from our side!

This week, Berthold Baurek-Karlic, Alexander Rapatz and our Junior Analyst Lukas Arzberger attended the European Forum Alpach and took part in the Economic Symposium. One of this year’s hottest topics was the digital revolution.

The topics of merging industries, creating new business models and promoting a closer collaboration between startups and big corporates were intensively discussed at a side event with Wolfgang Anzengruber (CEO, Verbund AG), State Secretary Harald Mahrer and Richard Grasl (ORF Commercial Director). 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 closer with startups and therefore enable access to innovation.  This approach has already been proven to work across many industries, as Mr. Mahrer pointed out.

 

Venture Capital in Austria

Afterwards, with an insipring backdrop of picturesque mountain scenery, Wilhelm Molterer (Vice President and member of the Management Committee of the European Investment Bank), Christoph Leitl (Chairman of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce) and our CEO Berthold Baurek-Karlic discussed the current market environment for establishing venture capital funds in Austria. One big step forward would be, if trusts were given the necessary permission to invest in venture capital. Another one, if banks would be capable to offset their venture capital investments from the Austrian Bank Levy (“Bankenabgabe”), which would effectively compensate them for the burdening capital adequacy obligations for such investments.

The last one is critical for Europes’s economy, as Basel III and Solvency II have already raised barriers for banks and insurance companies to invest within this asset class. This caused an unintended side effect. In fact, both regulatory frameworks intended to stabilize the economy after the latest crisis. However, as a result early stage financing was also strongly challenged through these regulatory frameworks. Venture Capital is urgently needed in Europe as it drives growth, builds jobs and secures the competitiveness of local markets.

 

We hope the current attention for this topic, discussed by Top Level Executives and Politicians from all over Europe, will boost positive developments to ease this challenging market environment.

 

Photo by Zátonyi Sándor (ifj.) Fizped (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons