Less than two years after its start, the Bulgarian fintech startup Payhawk raised a new investment of €3M. The seed round was led by the Western European Earlybird Digital East Fund, the Berlin TinyVC, and leading experts from the financial sector. The new funding will be used mainly for the expansion of the company’s activities to Germany where it already has an office. Development activities and technical support remain in Bulgaria.

Payhawk was founded in 2018 by former employees of Telerik. The fintech provides software and personal debit cards that automate the management of any type of business expenses. The platform allows chief financial officers and business managers to control the expense process from one place, process billing documents, integrate their accounting software, and gather real-time reports and analyses. Payhawk’s solution allows for easy integration with banking systems.

The company operates in 14 countries and serves over 1000 corporate clients. The company has offices in Sofia and London, and since recently in Berlin. Currently, it has a team of 18 employees and plans to double this number within two years.

This is the second big investment for Payhawk. In 2019, the company raised funding of € 500 000 from Eleven’s second fund. The total funding raised by the company from outside investors totals €3.65M.

In 2018, Acronis opened its new office in Sofia, establishing a European R&D center for cyber protection, AI and blockchain projects. Sofia Investment Agency has been partnering Acronis in the process of establishing operations in our city. The international leader in cybersecurity and hybrid cloud solutions started its business with a team of 20 people. Almost two years later, more than 200 people work for the team of the company in Sofia. 

Stanislav Protassov, co-founder at Acronis, shares with us what makes Sofia the place to launch a successful business and to develop local solutions with global application.

Acronis opened its office in Sofia in 2018, establishing a European R&D center for cyber protection, AI and blockchain projects. Why Sofia?

It was a considered decision. We actually spent three years on research to find an ideal base in Europe. For this purpose, apart from Bulgaria, I personally visited Malta, all the Baltic countries, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We have been looking for a good talent base, taxation system, cost of living, economy level, and public safety. Eventually, we picked Bulgaria over the other European countries. 

We chose Bulgaria due to the country’s location, its status as an EU member, and the fact the local economy has good potential for future growth. Also, at that time we already had laid down the foundations for opening a local office — a 12-year partnership with T-Soft, a software engineering company based in Sofia, which Acronis had recently acquired. This partnership was a good base to start with.

Within two years, our team has grown from 20 to over 200 people. We are on track to become the largest Acronis R&D location and expect to grow up to 1000 people in the next couple of years.

Would you say that the talent in Bulgaria (in Central and Eastern Europe in general) is equipped with the skills for the tech industry? How did this affect your operations and how is it important for your business?

The level of engineering education in the Western, Central and Eastern Europe, and in Bulgaria in particular, is traditionally good. There are many good universities, and graduates are highly qualified. At Acronis, we are developing innovative products, so we are looking for talented and exceptionally qualified specialists. Collaboration with universities is one way of getting those talents.

Having an R&D presence in universities is beneficial for both universities and

The software company ATPCO specializing in the development of software for ticket price formation and retailing, and various corporate tools for the aviation industry, will open its new office in Sofia, the company announced. It will be its only office in the EU and will start with a team of 5 people. The team will be led by Boyan Hristov, who has previously worked on various projects with ATPCO. The new office plans to expand its team to 15 people by the end of 2020. This decision is motivated by the company’s vision of Bulgaria as a rapidly developing technology market with qualified specialists.  

The Bulgarian office will be working on the development of the Next Generation Storefront (NGS) system, the company’s new standard which allows better presentation, selection, and search of the products of the airline companies by the customers.

ATPCO works with more than 430 airline companies worldwide and delivers 99% оf the fare-related data in the industry. The company is owned by 15 of the biggest airlines in the world including Air Canada, Air France, British Airways, American Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Delta Air, Lufthansa и United Airlines. ATPCO now has offices in Dulles, VA, where the company is headquartered; London, UK; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Singapore. You can read the full announcement on the company’s website.

Dreams Trans has begun the construction of a logistics park in the industrial zone of Bozhurishte. The project is worth BGN 25 million and will be completed by mid-2021.

The logistics park of the Bulgarian transport company will include a large warehouse and other built-up facilities with а total floor area of a bit over 35 000 sq. m.

The complex will have 25 000 sq. m of storage areas and 40 000 pallets. There will be a truck service, a gas station, and charging stations for electric cars. The project also includes a restaurant, a hotel with 35 rooms for the needs of the company and the businesses around it, a spa centre, a swimming pool, a fitness centre for the employees, and an office area. 

The project will be carbon neutral with 1.1 megawatts of photovoltaics on the warehouse roofs and gas powered air conditioning. 

Dreams Trans decided to choose Bozhurishte because of its key location at a crossroads. Another defining factor is the surrounding traffic between Turkey and Europe and along the North-South axis (Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania to Greece). The transport company also sees prospective new clients among the other companies in the economic zone.  

The logistics park is expected to start operating by the middle of 2021 at the latest. 

The American Yotpo acquired Sofia’s SMSBump – an SMS marketing platform founded less than three years ago. Only a year after its launch, the Bulgarian startup raised €360K – 175K from a business angel and 200K from Eleven’s second funding round for a 5.7% share of the company. Although the exact deal amount remains undisclosed, according to Eleven Ventures this is the highest price ever paid for a company backed by a Bulgarian VC. The first place used to be occupied by Vayant, which was sold for $35M.

SMSBump has a team of 20 people and a customer base of 28 000 e-commerce merchants, with 85% of them located in the USA and Canada. The UK, Spain, and France are among the firm’s markets in Europe, and it also has clients in Asia and Oceania. According to Mihail Stoychev, the clients of SMSBump have generated over $100M of additional revenue thanks to the platform, and the company’s revenue for 2019 approaches BGN 7.5M.

The American Yotpo is a leading marketing e-commerce platform with headquarters in New York. The company has over 400 employees and provides integrated solutions for product reviews, user-generated content and loyalty programmes. You can find the official announcement of Yotpo’s acquisition of Sofia’s SMSBump here.

Back in 2015, four friends gathered in Sofia to form the management team of a new company. They were all professionals in their respective fields – IT, Project Management and Sales. And they had an international background but decided to return to Sofia and launch Bulbera.

Bulbera already had a few products that were in TOP 10 at the Blackberry World online shop. The same year the company launched the parental control app Protect Your Kid which was made in cooperation with the German security company Netcos. In the following three years the app was downloaded over 100 000 times all over the world, including in high-tech countries like Japan and the USA. While working on the parental control app, the Bulbera team launched a CSR campaign in Sofia aiming to educate kids, parents and teachers on how to be safe online. The program became popular quickly and spread across the whole country. As a result, Bulbera became a trusted partner of the National Police Cybercrime Forces, SAFENET and the National Agency for Child Protection. 

In the meantime, the company grew, reaching 17 Developers and 3 offices in 2019. Currently, Bulbera’s portfolio includes clients such as Nokia, Telenor, Takeaway, Caritas, Pleven Medical University and many more. The team works in three verticals – Healthcare, Telecoms and Leisure & Hospitality.

Deyan Blagoev, Business Development Manager at Bulbera, and a frequent guest of TV Shows, conferences, schools and all type of events related to child cyber security, shares with us what makes Sofia the place to launch a successful business and to develop local solutions with global application.

An outsourcing destination becoming a developer of local solutions with global application – is this a real trend here, in Sofia?

Sofia started as an outsourcing destination many years ago. Gradually, many new businesses and startups emerged, and currently they are offering a full range of innovative solutions. These businesses employ highly skilled professionals that change and improve the ecosystem and guarantee the quality of the products and services. For example, one of the biggest movie studios that shoots films for Hollywood is based in Sofia. And recently, a Sofia-based Bulgarian company won a technological Oscar award for its software for visual effects. There are numerous other examples in many sectors, such as the IT, Creative & Biotech sectors.

How do you evaluate the overall business climate in Sofia today?

I think Sofia

The Sofia-based Prospecto will be acquired by the German Offerista Group. Both companies are developing digital retail marketing platforms that bring together the offerings of retail chains. 

Offerista works with retailers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. Prospecto Group is one of the leading companies in Central and Eastern Europe and collaborates with over 100 retailers and brands in 16 countries in the region. In addition to Sofia, Prospecto has offices in Budapest and Bucharest. With the acquisition of the Bulgarian company, Offerista Group will expand its business to new markets in Europe and to nearly 40 million customers.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Prospecto announced that the company will continue to be managed by its founder and CEO Ognyan Popov after the acquisition. The Sofia-based company was admitted to the pilot edition of the Dare to Scale growth program by the Bulgarian office of Endeavor. The program is aimed at scale-ups with big potential for future growth.

You can find more information about the exit in the blog of Endeavor Bulgaria.

A team of Bulgarian developers is at the heart of the latest huge leap in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud analytics. The thirty IT specialists are part of the Bulgarian team of AtScale, and their product is unique, with no equivalent in the world, according to the US software company. 

The whole coding, architecture, automatic and manual testing process of AtScale 2020.1 has been carried out entirely in Sofia and fully entrusted to Bulgarian engineers, thus becoming an important step towards the fulfillment of the ambition of the Silicon Valley-based company to start building 60% of its software at the Sofia-based Technology Center by the end of 2020 .

Redefining traditional data virtualization and delivering upon the promise of cloud transformation, AtScale 2020.1 provides secure, self-service analysis while reducing compute costs by 10x, query performance improvements of more than 12.5x and enhanced user concurrency by 61x (Source: AtScale Cloud Data Warehouse Benchmark Report).

“AtScale 2020.1 is a major step toward achieving our long-term vision of delivering intelligent data virtualization to every enterprise. And the culprits for this exceptional product are our people in Sofia,” said Christopher Lynch, Executive Chairman and CEO of AtScale.”

When we first came to Bulgaria 1 year ago, we made a commitment that our future team here would work on par with the teams in California and Boston, and that they would build a product from start to finish. I’m happy we were able to bring together the best folks and give them the opportunity to do engineering at the highest level,” said Mathew Baird, Founder and CTO, AtScale.

Delivering on the promise of a single enterprise view of all analytics data, AtScale’s enhanced autonomous data engineering alleviates the performance and scale challenges of traditional data federation, manual data engineering and reliance on query caches. Additional enhancements in AtScale 2020.1 include a virtual cube catalog for simplified management of data assets and granular policy control that integrates natively with existing enterprise data catalog offerings.

“We have the chance to build a product with world-class features and functionalities. It wasn’t easy, but we are all very excited and happy with the final result. Every day, we are working on some of the most interesting technology challenges in the cloud, AI and machine learning, and we can’t wait to see what’s the big step ahead,” said Dimitar Manev, DevOps Lead in the Sofia team of AtScale.

AtScale

Just four months after getting a foothold in Sofia, Coursera announced its plans to expand in the Capital and double its team. The global online learning platform opened an office in Sofia with the acquisition of the US-Bulgarian startup Rhyme Softworks.

The company will expand its engineering team and will focus on the creation of customised hands-on project trainings in the platform for the employees of corporate clients.  

Coursera is a leading online training platform with over 45 million students worldwide. The platform collaborates with nearly 200 universities with a world-renowned image. About 2 000 companies train their talents through the platform.  

Coursera invests in its centre in Sofia as part of its Coursera Labs initiative. It aims to provide the flexibility and personalisation of those courses part of the platform that involve work on practical projects and developments. Coursera acquired Rhyme Softworks for its product, which allows developers to create learning projects accessible through an Internet browser quickly and easily. It is precisely the upgrading of this product that will allow the creation of practical training tasks by the incorporation of the necessary third-party software applications. 

The construction company Cordeel Bulgaria, a local unit of the Belgium-based Cordeel Group, has begun the construction of a modern office and logistics centre for the distributor Orbico Bulgaria, part of the Croatian Orbico Group. The investment is € 26.5 million and 500 staff will work in the centre after it is complete.

The logistics base will include offices and warehouses with a total area of 57,000 sq m. It is located near Botevgradsko Shosse road and its construction should be completed by mid-2021.

Orbico Bulgaria’s logistics centre will handle the storage and distribution of brands of Philip Morris Bulgaria, Shell Bulgaria, Mars and Procter & Gamble.

The Bulgarian online fashion store Remixshop.com is the Central and Eastern Europe’s first and only to implement EU policies for sustainable textile management practices in its business model. The store belongs to the Sofia-based Remix Global, which offers the “Sell to Remix” service in nine European countries, allowing customers to extend the life of unwanted clothing and accessories by sending them free of charge to the company’s logistics centre in Sofia. 

As part of its plan to grow the business in a sustainable direction, Remix initially launched the service in Bulgaria and Romania and then in Poland, Germany and Austria. In 2019, the service became available to the other markets where the online store operates — Greece, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. 

“Sell to Remix” allows customers to send their gently used clothing and accessories to be sold on remixshop.com with easy, free-of-charge shipping and receive a percentage of the final price. The money earned can be used for purchases from the website, transferred to a personal account or donated to SOS Children’s Villages.

Unlike consumer platforms that connect sellers and buyers, Remix takes care of the clothes fully – from disinfection and defect inspection, to taking pictures, pricing and shipping to customers; unusable items are being recycled. A customer only needs to order the Remix Bag (a large, sturdy bag made of recycled polyethylene) and request a courier for return delivery to Remix. 

This way, the service becomes an effective method of separate collection of textiles and prevents unwanted accumulation of textile waste. 

A circular economy action plan with a focus on sustainable use of resources, especially in high-impact resource-intensive sectors such as textile and construction, has also been enshrined in the so-called Green Deal, part of the Agenda for Europe of the newly-appointed President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.

The store handles about 300,000 items from orders every month and over 9,000 full Remix Bags from nine countries. To manage operational activities, Remix works with internally developed software and hardware products, including a proprietary ERP solution that optimises production processes. 

“We are based in Sofia, because here we are able to find competent IT specialists to carry out the technological development of the various units of the company and to become more efficient and productive,” says Genoveva Petrova, CEO of Remix. According to her, businesses in the city, including small and