Luka Sucic, Hub:raum: ‘Romania attracts a lot of our interest’

As business development and investment manager at Hub:raum, the incubator of Deutsche Telekom, Luka Sucic has a lot of insight into Romanian companies. One has already been accepted into the program and another two seem viable candidates, Sucic tells BR.

Otilia Haraga

What differences are there between hub:raum and the typical seed fund?

A lot. The basic one is that we are a telecom seed fund that serves a specific purpose. We are part of Deutsche Telekom, and one of our primary objectives is to find and identify innovations, really good opportunities and disruptions in the telecom field.

What differs is that for us one of the most important things is the impact of revenue and innovation on our national companies.

So, we take the deals that we invest in and we launch them in different markets. In Romania we have two deployments right now. I believe they are going to be launched within the portfolio of Telekom Romania. One is called Omnipaste and the second is called EcoisMe. Both of them will be launched in the DT portfolio within three to six months. They are going to be offered to the customers of Telekom Romania either as a spend-on service or bundled within some other services. Omnipaste is a startup from Sibiu which works on universal connection between devices. EcoisMe is a sort of smart algorithm that detects in real time what devices are connected in your house and can name them.

What type of ventures does hub:raum finance?

Since we are a telecom fund, we usually finance startups with telecom synergies: anything from telecommunications to internet-of-things, machine-to-machine, e-commerce, cybersecurity, all sorts of things. Basically, what we are trying to find is something that we can offer to our customers and make them happy along the way – to help startups grow and at the same time help our national companies grow.

What are the eligibility conditions?

Basically, they just need to apply. They should go to our website or contact one of us because we meet frequently in Romania. We have a Romanian colleague working for us and I am also here every couple of months. They just need to submit an application and then do a pitch for us and basically prepare sort of a telecom synergy point of view. It’s not a complicated process, basically a half hour discussion. We also have an acceleration program in Krakow that lasts for eight days and we use it as a sort of additional evaluation procedure.

How do you prepare for failure?

One out of ten will succeed, that is the general rule, but we are trying to minimize that by selecting only the best ones and trying to make sure they have the product market fit, they have all the pre-conditions that are necessary for a startup. We mentor them and coach them along the way from the start because we also invest in prerevenue and pretraction, a sort of conceptual phase, alpha or beta version, and then we take them along the way with us with a lot of our mentorship and development power. Then we launch them into the country and they can really see from early on what works and what doesn’t and what they need to change.

How many Romanian startups are there in the program right now?

At this point we have five investments, one of which is Romanian. I am referring here to Omnipaste. We also have two Romanian teams we are in discussions with right now. So, possibly, by the end of the year we could have three. Romania represents a big portion of our interest and also activities. There are a lot of vibrant things going on here.

What is the average investment you make in a startup?

In general we invest EUR 80,000. For us the exit does not matter. If it never happens but it still generates revenue for our national companies, we are perfectly happy. If it happens, super, but this makes us different from everyone in the field except for corporate venture funds. For us, generating revenues and bringing value to the national companies is the most important part.

DMCA

PROTECTED