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Slovenia’s start-up support fund invests €4mn in five digital firms
Slovenia’s start-up support community Silicon Gardens established a new fund that raised €4mn from local companies in three months and invested in five digital start-ups, media reported. Silicon Gardens II fund, set up in October 2019, plans to raise and invest a total of €5mn and help start-ups enter foreign markets, Slovenia Times reported on February 25.
Silicon Gardens II is a follow-up to Silicon Gardens I, which was established in 2014 to support ten early-stage companies, six of which are still active and growing.
The investors come from successful technological companies, including the Slovenian subsidiary
of the Swiss sports data analysis company Sportradar, video game developer Outfit7, software company Cosylab and e-commerce companies Studio Moderna and Mimovrste.
Polish software maker SoftwareHut boasts one of the fastest expansion rates in Europe
Polish software developer SoftwareHut took the 33rd place amongst European companies in the Financial Times' annual list of the fastest-growing 1,000 European companies.
The software house finished the highest amongst 14 Polish technology companies that made the annual list. SoftwareHut’s global expansion into
10 different markets saw a 3,090% absolute growth rate between 2015-2018, according to the list.
SoftwareHut is a subsidiary of TenderHut, which also made the list in 627th position, with growth of 269.2%.
The Financial Times ranking was created on the basis of a comparison of the revenue growth rates of enterprises from 32 European countries in 2015–2018.
At the end of 2018, the Białystok-based software developer recorded revenue of PLN19.9mn (€4.67mn), compared to PLN620,000 in 2015. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from the years 2015-2018 was 217%.
A vast 95% of the company’s turnover is generated on foreign soil as the company currently operates out of 10 global markets.
5G auction in Romania delayed until end-2020
Romania’s telecom market regulator ANCOM announced that the specification for the sale of frequency bands allocated for 5G applications would be ready by September and the tender itself would take place in the last quarter of this year, Mediafax reported.
5G applications in the frequency bands auctioned would thus become available commercially within two years from now, ANRE estimated, though warned about possible unexpected delays.
ANCOM previously implied that the auction would take place “during the first part of the year”.
However, the auction was postponed because of the memorandum signed by Romania and the US for the development of safe 5G technologies (to be included in the tender specifications). Furthermore, the European Union was also late with its guidance on “high-risk” suppliers of 5G technologies, which was released at the end of January.
The key issue remains in both cases the Chinese company Huawei — mentioned by neither the memorandum with the US nor the EU’s guidance, but implied in each of the two cases.
Huawei is being investigated in the US for espionage on behalf of the Chinese government.