GiftsUwish, Publitio and Good Game Arena are the first startups in which the ICT Hub Venture, the first Serbian private investment fund, invested, the ICT hub reported. The total investment is 90.000 EUR or 30.000 EUR per startup.
“With the investments, we support these three startups to further develop their products and to further promote them on their targeted market”, says Kosta Andric, Managing Director at the ICT Hub.
Besides the money, mentorship will be also provided by the ICT Hub. According to Andric, in the next few days one to one meetings between the startups and the mentors will be scheduled. The mentors as Andirc explains will be representatives from different industries with different backgrounds.
“They are mostly our partners, the ones that we’ve been in cooperation with for our program activities at the ICT Hub to date. International mentors will be involved as well, selected from our cooperators that we’ve acknowledged as important stakeholders to the fund”, says Andric, startit.rs reports.
These three startups are selected out of the 90 applications that the ICT Hub received during their first call that was open during the first three months of this year: starting from January 19th until March 19th.
“This shows us two things: there is a large number of startups that work on a product and are at an early stage of development, and that there is an interest and need for money and investment funds should support such projects”, Andric explains in his statement given to startit.rs. Until the end of 2018, this fund plans to support 15 more startups.
In case you missed the first call, starting from yesterday ICT Hub Ventures opened their second call. By the end of September, you can submit your application on the following link: http://icthubventure.com.
Who are the winners?
GiftsUwish is an iOS, Android and web-based app for crowd funding gifts. Their mission is to set new rules to the “game” of gift giving where people will receive only those gifts that they wish for and choose for themselves, while givers can join forces and split the cost of the gifts. GiftsUwish allows users to choose the gift that they want. Just share your perfect present with friends on social media, and they can chip in and split the cost.
Publitio plans to provide advanced APIs for image and video files through their service platform to the web and mobile application developers. The founder of this startup is Vujadin Divjak, an IT engineer with great experience in founding startups and rising investments, an experience that he obtained by leading startup Fliiby.
Good Game Arena is Dota 2 dedicated sports platform, that enables millions of passionate players, to experience how it feels to play in the pro-like environment. Their platform allows the users to experience a type of game where there is more than just MMR and few nerves at stake. Good Game Arena is currently in closed beta stage, and they are gathering their beta testers.
ICT Hub Venture on the other hand, is a private investment fund in Serbia, focused on early stage technology startups in the SEE region. By facilitating the creation and development of potent solutions they help transform traditional industries and create new businesses.