The year is slowly coming to an end and it’s the time to recapitulate. 2014, the year of the Horse in the Chinese calendar, was said to bring prosperity and wealth. Occupying the 7th position on the Chinese Zodiac, the Horse symbolizes such character traits as strength, energy, and an outgoing nature. Horses are extremely intelligent so they’re able to grasp new subjects with ease. They aren’t fond of taking orders and they’ll run from jobs they consider routine. They are associated with success and cannot stand failure. Nine startup companies were founded this year and Wayra played an important part of their stories. And we are proud because they all worked super hard. See for yourself!
- Total amount of investment: 190 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 3/10-15
- Number of users: 2870
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: active operation on four markets (SK,CZ,IE,ZA)
- Success: Winner of Startup Awards Slovakia
- Our 2015 goal: 700 paying customers by the end of 2015
- Most important value: experience, culture, knowledge
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Katka Pljaskovova
- Press article I am especially proud of: Prime time news in major TV-Markiza, Joj, RTVS, most popular daily newspaper and plenty of online coverage.
- What Wayra brought to my company: Supportive environment, interesting ideas
- Total amount of investment: 60 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 2/2
- Number of users: 1 B2B pilot
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: We’ve completed the Contextual Graph API we set to do when we joined and complemented it with our own POS (Part of speech tagger).
- Success: Winner of Startup Rally Vienna
- Our 2015 goal: Securing our first, big enterprise client in parallel to raising our seed investment round.
- Most important value: Curiosity
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Net Jacobsson, Jordan Schlipf
- Press article I am especially proud of: This article on Inventures: http://inventures.eu/venture/ingenio
- What Wayra brought to my company: Opportunities – Wayra has been extremely supportive in connecting us with the right people for our business and using the Wayra name opened us many doors around Europe.
- Total amount of investment: 240 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 3/6
- Number of users: 3
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: paying customers
- Biggest goal: To become No. 1 in US market
- Most important value: hard work
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Jordan Schlipf
- What Wayra brought to my company: Contacts, biz dev., we are working better as a team
- Total amount of investment: 200 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 2/5
- Number of users: 1,000 – 2,000
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: We are live!
- Biggest goal: Land an investor / major paying client before we leave Wayra.
- Most important value: Collaboration
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Ondrej Fryc
- What Wayra brought to my company: Super office space, interesting conferences, a E600k valuation, event tickets, … and a massive amount of support.
- Total amount of investment: 120 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 4/ 8
- Number of users: 12
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: Attracting a significant investment offer
- Biggest goal: Expand our reach abroad and build partner network there.
- Most important value: Teamwork
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Too many to choose just one, really.
- Press article I’am especially proud of: article in Forbes (October 2014)
- What Wayra brought to my company: Sense of co-working, contact with “outside world”, more involvement in other things than just everybody´s narrow field of work.
- Total amount of investment: 139 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 2/10
- Number of users: 1000
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: Receiving new investment
- Biggest goal: to be number one service connecting patients with doctors
- Most important value: diversity
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Luis Malvido
- Press article I am especially proud of: We were the Startup of the Week on Wired!
- What Wayra brought to my company: Connections, credibility, self-development
- Total amount of investment: 60 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 5/9
- Number of users: 1000
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: We’re already having paying customers
- Success: We had very successful launch – over 100 guests.
- Biggest goal: Break even at the end of 2015 – 10k EUR/month revenue
- Most important value: Collaboration
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Paul Dubsky (upTaxi)
- Press article I’am especially proud of: byznys.ihned.cz
- What Wayra brought to my company: Good comments for our business, interesting location to make business in, EVENTS!
- Total amount of investment: 280 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 6/6
- Number of users: 18000
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: cooperation with Rovio
- Success: Winner of Startup Sauna and Tech Travel Award
- Biggest goal: to get the next round investment
- Most important value: determination
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Jordan Schlipf
- Press article I am especially proud of: This article that was printed in the biggest daily paper newspaper in Poland.
- What Wayra brought to my company: We have been able to structure our thinking a lot, tested a few hypothesis. Wayra has been extremely helpful in promoting our achievements. Thanks to the networking we were able to reach some agreements with new partners and present our ideas to many others. Also the workshops brought were extremely useful, really on the highest level possible.
- Total amount of investment: 40 000 EUR
- Team members (before Wayra/after): 1/3
- Number of users: 700
- Biggest achievement since joining Wayra: Paying customers
- Biggest goal: Get an investment
- Most important value: Transparency
- Most interesting person I met in Wayra: Michal Truban
- What Wayra brought to my company: Entrepreneurial experience, new angle of view on our business and “This is just a game” by Evzen Cekota