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