10 international SaaS startups are beginning their 5 month journey with us. This is the first time we’re running the Wise Guys Saas program in our new market – Italy! But that’s not the only unique thing about the batch. It’s also the second time in our history, when we open SWG to public funding (read more about this here). The fundraised amount will be matched by our Challenger fund (6M EUR) and SWG friendly VCs and Angel investors will be involved in follow-up investments in the accelerated startups.
The acceleration program runs from November until March 2021. Besides a cash investment, selected startups go through an intense mentorship driven program managed from our Milan office space. However, due to Covid restrictions, the program will commence online and is planned to be held in hybrid format with modules online and on-site, should the regulations be loosened.
This batch has 10 startups from 7 different countries – Hungary, Ukraine, India, Italy, Lithuania, Turkey and the UK. And what’s even more fascinating is that in this batch we have female founders in 40% of the teams!
Meet the teams selected for the batch:
Agrovisio (Turkey) – monitoring farmlands, Agrovisio provides insights to farmers & agribusinesses for risk management & sustainable production.
BotSpace (India) – develops a chatbot platform that helps non-technical business owners automate customer support.
Heybooster (Turkey) – helps marketers by turning all marketing data into actionable insights to achieve their business goals.
iDEAL (Italy) – patent pending B2B2C digital platform that simplifies and optimizes the sales process for Car Subscriptions (Long Term Rental / Leasing) facilitating the entire process from quotation, scoring all the way to contract closure.
Kaiku (UK) – changing early stage funding at Seed and Series A with Machine Learning to simplify and streamline the process.
Ocoya (Lithuania) develops tools for e-commerces to automatically generate, publish & manage social media posts with the help of AI.
Reviewmonkey (Italy) – end-to-end solution for collecting and analyzing the Voice of Customer.
Scan&Eggs (Hungary) – one-click solution for photorealistic human characters for video game developers.
UTrigg (Ukraine) – AI behavioral analytics (mood analysis) at surveys & websites.
Roundabout (Italy) – Local Marketing with Instagram Micro Influencers.
SWG in Italy
4 awesome people will be managing this program. Andrea Orlando joined our team in March as an Entrepreneur in Residence and now has become our Managing Partner in Italy. He oversees our operations in the Italian ecosystem and is also an investor at Startup Wise Guys. The Program Managers are Lauma Gailite and Giovanni Khoury. Both of them are moving to Italy after living abroad for a while. Giovanni is moving back from living in Lebanon for a couple of years. However, Lauma is moving to Italy from running our latest SaaS program in (online) Riga. And last but not least, they are supported by the golden hands of the intern Andrea Chiavari. Should the Italian team take all their pets to work, we’d have 2 officedogs and 3 officecats!
Entering the Italian market is part of the European expansion strategy of Startup Wise Guys. Our goal is to help to build even more successful tech companies in Europe. We plan to run at least 4 programs in the coming 2 years aimed at early stage Italian startups and foreign startups with Italian co-founders or startups seeing Italy as one of the core expansion markets. Our crowdfunding campaign has seen great success – we passed the ‘half a million’ mark, doubling our initial target (300k EUR). And we are still taking in new investors until November 28!
