The multinationals have announced a new partnership with Infobip to launch an innovative mentoring program for Croatian startups. The country, with a population of more than 4 million inhabitants, has already created its first two unicorns and its powerful startup community is becoming increasingly prominent in the region of South-East Europe and within the EU. This is the case of Infobip, the leading global platform for cloud communications and one of the examples of a successful startup that started precisely in Croatia and achieved the status of “unicorn”.
The Scale-Croatia program is open to all Croatian startups from Infobip’s Startup Tribe program. In the first year of the program, the founders of 16 local startups have received access to a 4-month mentorship, which has allowed an even faster and better quality development and scaling of their businesses.
Startup founders will have specialized mentors from Google and Goldman Sachs with whom they will be able to consult on various aspects of business development: products, fundraising, marketing, sales and other fields.
“We are very happy that through Scale|Croatia we can help Croatian startups to more easily reach corporations like Google or Goldman Sachs”, declared Nikola Pavešić, Head of Startups at Infobip. “The fact that these big companies recognize the potential of our startup ecosystem is a validation for us but also an important honor for the Croatian technology sector, which is positioned as a new European technology hub, the European Silicon Valley”Pavesić added.
The Google Jigsaw security project manager, Scott Carpenter, has pointed out that for those responsible for the program “it is an honor to participate in the mentoring program of Scale-Croatia, to further develop the technological ecosystem in this emerging European hub, and associating ourselves with the leaders of innovative companies in the region.”
According to Jared Cohen, the co-director of Applied Innovation and president of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs, “we decided to test this project with Croatian startups, because we saw a pattern of stories with great possibilities but little means. The data shows remarkable results for the up-and-coming tech sector in the Baltic country, which appears to have a similar journey to the one that the Estonian and Israeli tech ecosystem once had. Now is the right time to commit to this select group of young entrepreneurs.
Launch in New York
The program launched in June with an in-person event in New York City, at the offices of Goldman Sachs and Google, It was attended by most of the 16 startup founders, including Orqa, based in Osijek, a world leader in the development of FPV goggles for drone pilots.
The co-founder and CEO of OrqaSrđan Kovacević, enthusiastically declared that “the project has opened up access to a completely new level of expertise for Croatian companies that unfortunately cannot be found at home. We found it very useful to gauge Google’s expertise in product management, as well as Goldman Sachs’ expertise in listing technology companies on global stock exchanges.”
Currently, the startups are halfway through the Scale program and if it is successful with the Croatian edition, it will serve as a model for other regions of the world. Ivan Burazin, Chief Developer Experience Officer of Infobip has also shown great satisfaction because through the Scale-Croatia, “we can help national start-ups to go so far, something that ten years ago, at the beginning of Infobip, was almost impossible”.
