Central European start-ups blaze a trail together to Silicon Valley

Twelve selected technology firms based in Central Europe came together in Silicon Valley on 21-23 April 2015 to present themselves to local investors.

The trip was part of a pilot project within the WE4Startups initiative among the countries of the Visegrad Four group in the area of supporting start-ups. The purpose of the initiative is to raise the profile and attractiveness of the CEE region and thus to draw the attention of American venture-capital funds and individual investors to the Central European start-up ecosystem.

Besides Slovak, Polish and Hungarian firms, those exhibiting in Silicon Valley also included the Czech companies Manta Tools, BrandEmbassy and Angelcam, which thus got an opportunity to present their projects to specialists from Silicon Valley such as Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures, Lea Bajc, Mohanjit Jolly of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, John Wolpert of IBM Watson and Fadi Bishara of Blackbox.

Manta Tools helps companies with large data depositories to bring order to their business intelligence. The given solution supports technologies used in the biggest corporations headquartered mainly in the United States. “The We4Startups initiative is a great opportunity for us to present our company in Silicon Valley. It isn’t only about experience and evaluation, but also meeting with interesting people and establishing new partnerships,” says Tomáš Krátký, executive director of Manta Tools.

BrandEmbassy introduced to the market its first tool, which enables companies to find and easily address dissatisfied customers in an online environment. Founded by Czechs and with a branch in London, the company monitors fifty million online discussions in twenty languages and automatically sorts posts according to customers’ influence on other users and the urgency of requests. The Angelcam project is an online platform and the first app-store for IP cameras, which offers a range of useful applications and thus transforms conventional camera systems into smart cameras.

CzechInvest’s office in San Francisco took part in the preparation and organisation of the whole project. “The event was very well received in the local community and we are already starting work on the next one in the second half of this year. Cooperation in the V4 region, inspired by the example of the Scandinavian countries, seems to be an appropriate model for attracting the attention of foreign investors to our region and to generally raise awareness of the technologies and innovations originating in Central and Eastern Europe,” said Roman Horáček, CzechInvest’s representative on the West Coast of the United States.