“New Urban Tech Ventures has been developed in Telelink for several years and I have been doing providential investments in space for almost a decade, so this is not something that we started yesterday. But now we wanted to formalize this effort and structure it in a separate company so that we can better support our startups and evolve the impact we can have, ”explains Lubomir Minchev, founder and CEO of Telelink Investments.
Thus, at the beginning of the year, the first official venture capital company (CVC) in Bulgaria came to life. To date, Telelink Investments has brought together five technological companies – three spin -offs from Telelink (Develiot, Modahift and Fieldontrack) as well as two companies in the Endeavour network (Softgroup and Tiger Technology). In the coming months, Mounchev and the other partner of the fund, Hans Van HouweLINGEN, will finalize the structure and the strategy and eventually open an office in the Netherlands.
Incubation of corporate startups
One of the most interesting things about Telelink’s investments at the moment is that all derived companies are incubated and do R&D in the construction of Telelink, which also hosts Telelink Business Services, a multinational ICT service supplier that , in 2018, recorded € 59.5 million. In income in all markets and made its debut on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange earlier in June 2020.
An environment for incubation and mentorship in continuous start -ups where we can see the real development of IoT systems for air quality monitoring and automated solutions for intelligent transport services is a new concept for the Bulgarian business world. In the past two years, corporate accelerators have started to appear slowly on the map – Raiffeisenbank, Visa, Sopharma are some examples – and providential investments come from Big levels of local size like Bulpros, Scalefocus, and Nemetschek. Nevertheless, participation in companies in innovation with a high orientation of the ecosystem is still quite limited.
The urban technology market
Back to Telelink’s investments, the fund focuses on the post-series regional series and pre-series A company operating mainly in the intelligent fields of cities, mobility and urban analysis. “Urban Tech is a very big subject which will be increasingly relevant in the coming years. Of course, we will probably look towards the communication infrastructure – for example, IoT and Digital Twins – because this is the field where I have been working for about 20 years and where Tellink has proven its expertise by working with telecommunications like Vodafone In the United Kingdom and Deutsche Telekom, ”explains Milnév.
Globally, the urban technology market has indeed increased at a remarkable rate in recent years. According to an analysis of the Pitchbook data by Patrick Adler and Henrik Hoelzer, the venture capital investment in space went from almost in 2010 to 17.7 billion euros in 2015 and 62 billion euros in 2018. -below, it can be observed in the distribution of investments in investments in Urban Tech of 2015 and 2019.
| Vertical | Urban technological investments in a billion euros |
| Mobility | 132 |
| Urban delivery | 55.7 |
| Proptech | 30.9 |
| Smart cities / Urban IT | 27.6 |
Telelink Investments has no defined size yet and future investments will probably be assessed in case.
The current portfolio of Telelink investments
Develiot Creation of IoT detection systems that help municipalities make data -based decisions regarding air quality and water systems management.
Field is a company that uses AI to improve the efficiency of operating processes in the field.
Modeling Give a small and medium -sized transit the software and hardware tools for automatic prices collection, the automatic vehicle (AVL) location and information on real -time passengers.
Flexible group Provides end -to -end traceability technology to the pharmaceutical industry.
Tiger technology Develops highly efficient solutions for data, files and management of workflows for media, IT and surveillance industries.