Romania’s IntelligentBee created its own ‘Shark Tank’ to fund employee business ideas

Based in Iasi, Romania, IntelligentBee is holding its own internal “business reality show” similar to Shark Tank in which the winning projects receive up to €20,000 to grow their business ideas.

A startup in Iasi has organized its own “business reality show” to inspire its employees to come up with feasible business ideas.

Based on Romania’s “Arena Leilor” business reality TV show model (similar to Shark Tank), IntelligentBee employees pitch their ideas to a jury consisting of startup managers, and the best of them receive a budget of between €15,000 and €20,000 and six months to prove that their vision can become a successful business.

Costi Teleman

IntelligentBee Founder Costi Teleman told Startup Cafe that so far there have been a few ideas that have received the time and money promised, including one called Gamers Hunt, a platform for gamers who have been tired of their games and want to share them in the virtual world.

However, after six months, the business idea has not been capitalized into a final product.

Another project in the works, Peel.io, is an application through which IntelligentBee makes holiday requests, manages spending and all sorts of internal tasks, is also being born with the help of employees.

Initially, the application was devoted to programming the steps of an interview, so that those in the HR departments would not forget the details during a meeting with a potential future employee.

IntelligentBee was founded in Iasi in 2010, focusing primarily on outsourcing. Among the first contributors was Los Angeles’s SendGrid startup, which currently has revenues of over $100 million a year.

Now, the Romanian startup is working with 15 companies, including real estate startup Snag from Australia; Cloud Elements, which is a platform dedicated to developers; software company Carnegie Technologies; and Event Cloud, an event management software.

In early summer, the Iasi IT firm invested €200,000 launched the Eventway self-ticketing platform through which event organizers can sell electronic tickets, identifiable by a QR code.

Eventway is based on a Business-to-Business (B2B) model and addresses national and international organizations and companies.

The platform provides event organizers with an intuitive management process and is intended exclusively for the sale of electronic tickets. Subsequently, they can be purchased through the most popular payment processors and are delivered to the customer’s email address.

In 2017, the Iasi IT firm had a turnover of over $800,000, and in 2018 it grew by about 15%, according to Teleman.

IntelligentBee was born from the need of a custom software development company that gathers full-stack dedicated developers and skilled technical support associates, fully integrating into existing teams or cultures, acting like an extension and delivering flawless implementation for ideas.

Its vision is to improve the quality of online services by creating and maintaining web and mobile solutions that deliver significant value to its customers.