Fifteen teams from across Europe took part in the eight-day turbo acceleration programme by hub:raum at their new office in Krakow, with intensive workshops and mentoring from international experts. At the end of the acceleration, four startups were selected to join the incubation program: TourVia.Me (Montenegro), Omnipaste (Romania), Collar Pocket (Poland) and Excalibur (Slovakia).
We caught up with co-founder Ciprian Stavar from Omnipaste, one of the startups we recently covered as a Startup Pick, to find out more about their experience with hub:raum and their expectations from the upcoming incubation.
“We first met hub:raum at StartupWeekend Cluj, where we were offered a visit to their offices in Berlin,” said Stavar. “A few months later, we met again at the HowToWeb Bucharest and showed them our progress and future plans and that’s how they offered us a wildcard in their WARP programme. This was our chance and we took full advantage of it.”
Expectations
“The eight days in the accelerator were amazing and we got a lot of feedback and managed to build another showcase on the API – a click-to-call solution for classified ads websites,” said Stavar. “By the end of the incubation programme, besides having the product implemented, we also want to have other apps using our API, so more and more users will start interacting with their devices,”he added. “We believe that [by] using the boost from hub:raum, we would have the power to grow very high and be part of the telecom network API market, which is supposed to go to 157 billion dollars by the end of 2018.”
Being selected to join the incubation programme comes with several perks such as an investment of up to 80.000 euros, access to a 170-million user base in Europe and US, as well as to mentoring, seed funding and a coworking space.
Another of the selected teams is Excalibur, a Slovak startup that provides security for all websites using your mobile phone as a login token. These guys have already bagged awards at the ITU Young Innovator Award 2012, the StartupAwards.sk digital category, the Deutsche Telekom Innovation Contest 2013 and now at hub:raum Krakow. Read our profile on them here.
