CUPtech Departs to the USA with CzechAccelerator and Celebrates Its First Successes

31 May. 2013 | CzechInvest, Ministry of Industry and Trade | Thanks to the CzechAccelerator 2011-2014 project, another Czech start-up has travelled to the United States and is already collecting prizes in local competitions.

The company CUPtech registered in the CzechAccelerator 2011-2014 with a program that facilitates programmers’ work with visual material. Thanks to the project, which is financed from the Operational Programme Enterprise and Innovation (OPEI), two representatives of the company were able to travel to the United States for a three-month residency at the RocketSpace incubator in San Francisco. Their ideas have been awarded by the juries of the Photo Hack Day 4 and Startup Weekend San Francisco competitions.

Czech firms are receiving awards abroad for their creative concepts, even though the creative industry in the Czech Republic is still a bit on the periphery. This should change in the future and support should flow also to this prospective sector,” says Minister of Industry and Trade Martin Kuba.

“The CzechAccelerator project helps small and medium-sized start-ups with good ideas to reach innovation-intensive locations and acquire new partners, experience and capital investments. The ‘Accelerator’ has already sent 28 companies out into the world,” says Petr Ocko, acting CEO of CzechInvest and director of the EU Funds Section at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, describing the project.

CUPtech’s journey to the United States was assured by its successful DesignBorg project. “Our program enables specialists to work with data in PSD format, which otherwise requires installation and good knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, an expensive and complicated program that takes people several years to learn. Our DesignBorg saves them money and, mainly, time,” explains CUPtech director and developer Boris Suska, who adds that the time needed for working with the program is reduced by up to 80%.

Boris Suska and CUPtech’s owner, Zbynek Nedoma, arrived in the United States on 1 April and will stay there until 28 June 2013. Immediately after landing, they registered in the Photo Hack Day 4 competition, where they won third-place for the iMaze application. The event, in which 69 projects participated, took place at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. A week later, Suska and Nedoma entered the Startup Weekend San Francisco competition, where they took first place in the category focused on the Wix application, which is a tool for rapid creation of professional websites. CUPtech is now in negotiations on further cooperation in connection with Wix.

The CzechAccelerator project helps young firms to gain valuable experience abroad by arranging residencies for them in business incubators. Participants receive access to office space and contacts to potential strategic partners and investors. In addition, they can also hire advisors and a mentor to help improve their business plans.

CzechAccelerator operates in five destinations: two locations in the United States (Silicon Valley, Boston), Singapore, Israel and Switzerland. CUPtech travelled to the RocketSpace incubator in the heart of San Francisco, which is specifically intended for ICT firms and cooperates with the project partner US Market Access Center.