A Family Portrait of Belarusian Startups #BelarusMafia
This is a repost of an original article by Anthony Marchenko and Nastia Khamiankova, published in the Autumn 2015 issue of CoFounder.
While many people around the world might have no idea that Belarus exists, the country – located between Russia and Poland – is marked as a mother country of great tech talents and home to some amazing startups.
We will start with the number one startup from Belarus, based in United States:
Founded 2013 Funding $6.1M in 3 rounds
Founders Mikita Mikado
Location Minsk, Belarus and San Francisco, California
Why we chose them
Theirs is a true success story, which encourages many Belarus startups to believe in their idea and keep working on it. When Mikita made his first startup pitch at the local StartupWeekend in 2013, no one from the panel of judges understood their idea. After the success of his first startup, Quote Roller, (which he created for the purpose of sending proposals), the brand new tool was announced. PandaDoc is a tool that helps automate the creation of quotes, proposals, and contracts. It even lets you sign and send all your documents straight from your iPad. PandaDoc is located in San Francisco. The founder, Mikita Mikado, came to Belarus to announce $5 million in investments and thanked each of the engineers working on the project. That is a good example of the giving culture of the #BelarusMafia.
The following startups we highlight as highly attractive for a Series A investment:
Founders Kiryl Chykeyuk, Artem Stavenko
Location UK
This is a London-based company with Belarus founders that develops high-tech hologram advertising media for boosting sales in an innovative way. Kino-Mo received a number of British awards, worked with global brands from Samsung and Intel to Aston Martin, and was awarded Top 3 British inventions of the year. Recently, Kino-Mo has been crowned the winner of the Richard Branson’s Pitch to Rich Award.
Why we chose them
Not many hardware startups are originally from Belarus, and they’ve gone as far as winning Pitch to Rich.
Founded 2012
Founders Ilya Atrashkevich, Eugene Suslo, Igor Zubchenok
Location Belarus and Estonia
TaxiStartup offers white label mobile apps for taxi and limo companies. While Uber, Lyft, and Hailo have been quickly taking over the market, they still only have about 5% of it. This solution helps taxi companies stay competitive in a changing market.
Why we chose them
This is a good, promising tool, especially for countries where Uber is illegal. They’re simply cool, and their solution delivers optimized, efficient routes for cabs, saving up to 25% of battery power and fuel (and thus contributing to a better environment).
Founded 2012
Founders Kirill Kudin (ex), Denis Sklyarov, Daniel Plashchynski, Igor Goldenberg
Location USA
WiFi Map is a platform that shares crowdsourced information about free WiFi hotspots. Their goal is to have over 2 million WiFi hotspots in their database to make the internet more accessible for people worldwide. The application has 7,500,000 downloads and was featured by Apple as one of the most useful tools for “Travel to Russia.”
Why we chose them
The company has a very strong team. They’ve never raised money from investors and have been growing very fast. Now the company is for sale, and it is a good one to focus on.
The next list is devoted to the companies where we have found a repeatable and profitable business model:
EventerPro
Founded 2015
Founders Denis Kondratovich, Alex Horobchuk, Yuri Zisser
Location Belarus
EventerPro is a service for building your own ticket sales business with advanced analytical and marketing tools. It’s ideal for small and medium events, and for those who want to run a service similar to Eventbrite.
Why we chose them
This is a good, promising tool for the CIS region market. Eventbrite is a good one, but not convenient in terms of getting refunds and it doesn’t account for differences in payment systems, etc. EventerPro is growing rapidly and ready to conquer a healthy swath of the market.
Founded 2014
Funding bootstrap
Founder Pavel Batsylev
Location Minsk, Belarus
Why we chose them
Chemistry is one of the most hated subjects in school. Pavel has solved this issue by creating special helpers to pass any test. This app provides not just give answers and hints, but step-by-step solutions to any chemistry problem (even general reactivity and reactions). It has had more than 100K downloads on Google Play without any advertising activity. Not bad for a “school teen.”
Founded 2014
Funding bootstrap
Founders Pasha Mylnikov
Location Minsk, Belarus
Why we chose them
One more cool thing about the Belarusian startup ecosystem is its strong expertise in fitness apps. Thanks to Sport.com (ex. Viaden Media), we have developers who are aware of the specifics of the sector. One of the bright apps in this field is Lazy Monster, which focuses on lazy people who only work out from time to time. This app makes fitness fun, so even children become hooked on the funny monster character. Without any investment or paid marketing activity, they have reached up to 100K active users. It’s not hard to imagine what these guys can do with the proper strategy and marketing budgets.
KUKU
Founded 2015
Founders XB Software Co.
Location Belarus
KUKU is a cool web tool for publishing content to multiple social media sites at once. What distinguishes them from competitors is a really addictive, simple-as-heck UX/UI, coupled with an unexpectedly broad range of features and supported social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, VK and OK.ru).
Why we chose them
This is a very technically well-done product. Despite a long roadmap of features (more social networks, rich analytics, API, Google Chrome extension, smart posts, and tags suggestions, etc.), their focus is on wrapping everything up with Zen-style simplicity — something early adopters fell in love with! As a sweet bonus: KUKU is forever free and unlimited for the first users!
Founded 2014
Founders Elena Shkarubom, Andrei Gaidukevich, Mick Vyhouski
Location Belarus and Estonia
Meet n’ Greet Me offers international concierge services for business and leisure travelers. From airport pickups to flower deliveries, meet n’ greeters support customer and client relationship goals wherever they’re needed.
Why we chose them
This is a brilliant peer-to-peer model, which has great potential and a team is driven by an incredibly active founder who conquered the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Morocco and pitched the US President at the White House.
In this article, we can’t express enough how open and welcoming the Belarusian startup community (#BelarusMafia) is in cooperation with founders from the Baltic States. We admire the Belarusian startup community as technically strong, but weak in marketing and business development. We see a future in creating international teams of founders from Belarus and the Baltic States. One of the best examples of such a cooperation is TrackDuck, established by founders from Belarus and Lithuania, who met at the Garage48 Hackathon.
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