Hub:Raum plans to intensify local activities

Hub:Raum, the business incubator and accelerator of Deutsche Telekom, is receiving applications from Romanian startups and has already granted financing to one venture. However, Cosmin Ochisor, liaison manager at hub:raum Krakow, tells BR that the best is yet to come, as the program is about to become more active locally.

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By Otilia Haraga

“Startups from Romania are 20-30 percent of our deal flow from the 12 European countries we cover. But more importantly, the quality that we’re seeing is amazing. So you can say that it’s no accident that one of our first investments is a startup from Sibiu: Omnipaste. We are also planning to intensify our activities in Romania even more in the following months,” Ochisor tells BR.

Hub:Raum has a strong presence in Romania, he says, thanks to “local connections” such as the How to Web MVP academy, a pre-acceleration program for technological startups in CEE, and TechHub Bucharest, a community and workspace for tech entrepreneurs, and also has support from local telecom player Romtelecom, in which Deutsche Telekom (DT) is a shareholder.

The startups that enter the Hub:Raum program receive EUR 80,000 in funding in exchange for 10-20 percent of equity, but Ochisor says there are other major perks apart from the money.

“Hub:raum Krakow (ed. note: the Eastern European arm of the program) provides market access to customers in 12 European countries. The DT Group has approximately 180 million customers and, after the pilot, the potential for growth here is quite something. In addition, teams are provided with everything they need: special offers from our partners, eg, EUR 5,000 in Amazon services, Cisco support), access to all of DT’s experts in any field and a vast network of mentors – in essence what we call ‘corporate leverage,’” says Ochisor.

So far, Hub:Raum has had two local acceleration programs, and 5 out of the 25 teams that were invited were from Romania. “It ended up with one investment and possibly more in the future,” said the liaison manager.

He said that Omnipaste, which was selected at the end of last year, started off “with pre-seed investment that will be followed by seed agreement very shortly.”

Omnipaste received EUR 80,000 of financing, but also the benefits that Hub:Raum usually offers its selected startups. “They include market access to a lot of customers, help getting traction and validation, any kind of expertise they might require (legal, financial, technical) and a great pool of mentors and connections through Deutsche Telekom,” says Ochisor.

He adds that the key point for an incubator and accelerator program is to approach each country individually.

“It might sound like a cliché, but areas that are geographically close can have completely different market approaches, customs and business practices. It’s not possible to make one universal strategy and force it onto a diverse area like CEE. (…) We believe that using the experience from other more mature markets and applying local flavor is the right approach to the problem,” says Ochisor.

Taking an X-ray of the region and entrepreneurial spirit in Romania, Ochisor says that Eastern Europe is “waking up” and “entrepreneurship is growing at an amazing rate every year.”

“Countries like Romania, Poland and Croatia are showing that they indeed have something to show and that in a relatively short time things will get much more interesting. The technical talent pool is something that is often ignored. But they are still suffering from low self-esteem and thinking locally.”

He concludes that the signals on the market are positive. “The ideas that we’re seeing at ground level are positively surprising. On the business side, we still have a long way to go when comparing the situation to the West (the rest of Europe and the US). But I see that this has been recognized so we hope it will change soon if we constantly work on it.”

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