AlphaGamma Startups Overview is a monthly overview that attempts to identify promising startups from Europe and CIS and which have the potential to make a difference in their industries. Do you know or run a startup yourself we should look into? Contact us or fill in the form here.
Here are our picks for August 2016.
AlphaGamma Startups Overview: August 2016
OpenClassrooms – France
Founders: Mathieu Nebra and Pierre Dubuc
Year founded: 2007
Website: www.openclassrooms.com
Corporate email: hello@openclassrooms.com
A European leader in Digital Learning solutions, OpenClassrooms.com is a platform for online courses. The OpenClassrooms community includes over 1 million members today, and about 3 million users visit the platform each month to learn from its catalog of over 1,000 online courses, including the ones in MOOC format.
OpenClassrooms has established itself by developing career-oriented and certified courses, recognized for their pedagogical quality and their innovative services such as on-demand course access, the option to set your own learning pace, personalized mentoring to complete a learning path, and access to additional resources like eBook and video downloads. OpenClassrooms is also a pioneer service model with its Premium system that proposes advanced functionalities to have unlimited course access from 20€ per month.
“OpenClassrooms wants to make education accessible by prioritizing a community-based, engaging learning experience. We offer open courses so that you can learn with us and take control of your future. We help you get started on this path, but it doesn’t end there! Our goal is to help you throughout your whole life and entire professional journey. Intrigued and driven by education and technology, we were only 13 and 11 years old when we started this project: offer technical courses online for those who wanted to code. A passionate community quickly joined us and participates in our site development by also offering courses.”
Truecaller – Sweden
Founders: Alan Mamedi, Nami Zarringhalam
Year founded: 2009
Website: www.truecaller.com
Corporate email: info@truecaller.com
A phone is a critical tool for billions of people who use it on a daily basis – but despite all of the today’s advanced technology, little has been done to make the phone experience more intelligent, relevant and personal.
Truecaller will completely transform your mobile phone experience with a smarter set of features that will improve your daily life. This has been a natural evolution in how people have been using the app.
“We started off as an app to identify unknown numbers and block spam calls. Many people do not bother saving phone numbers anymore because they rely on the ability of Truecaller to find the right contact information, and identify the name behind a number, regardless of it being saved into their phone. We want to make this a more simplified and streamlined process so you have all the current information on people and businesses you need without ever having to leave the app.”
Volt – Turkey
Founder: Ali Halabi
Year founded: 2014
Website: www.thevoltapp.com
Corporate email: info@thevoltapp.com
Volt is Istanbul’s inner-city ridesharing platform. It is a real-time mobile application that connects people going in the same direction. Volt provides passengers with a smarter, faster, and more convenient form of transportation. It allows you to get to where you’re going in the comfort of a car by just sharing the cost of the ride!
“8 out of 10 cars in traffic have only the driver. That’s why our mission at Volt is to fill up empty seats in traffic. This will eventually help us reach our founding vision of solving Istanbul’s traffic problem, which is ultimately the result of the 85% empty seats!”
Kantox – UK
Founder: Philippe Gelis, Antonio Rami
Year founded: 2011
Website: www.kantox.com
Corporate email: contact@kantox.com
Kantox, an online finance platform, provides currency exchange and international payment solutions. It is a foreign exchange service provider, offering SMEs and mid-cap companies a comprehensive solution to their foreign exchange needs, based on transparency, efficiency, and value.
“We believe that the financial industry, known for its opacity and lack of innovation, needs a radical change. We believe it is time to redefine the industry, adopting more transparent, efficient and fairer models. In the end, it is all about the value we bring to clients. Our expertise, products, and solutions allow our customers to manage their currency exposure, build hedging strategies, automate FX transactions and process international payments in a smart way.”
Holvi – Finland
Founders: Tuomas Toivonen , Kristoffer Lawson , Teemu Hukkanen
Year founded: 2011
Website: www.holvi.com
Corporate email: support@holvi.com
Holvi is banking for Makers and Doers – European entrepreneurs, sole traders and business owners. It’s a current account with its own IBAN number and it’s designed to help you run your business in one place.
“With Holvi you can sell your products online, send beautiful invoices and track your cash flow in real-time. We help you to see your money transactions in an effortless, human-readable format. Holvi makes it easy for you to understand and share your finances.
Holvi is a Payment Institution, not an old-fashioned bank. We’re a modern money service for the new wave of Makers and Doers. We are building financial technology that has a purpose and makes a difference in your day-to-day life.”
Beddit – Finland
Founder: Lasse Leppäkorpi
Year founded: 2007
Website: www.beddit.com
Corporate email: support@beddit.com
Beddit Ltd. is a Finnish, fast-growing start-up dedicated to create the world leading sleep sensor.
“Every morning, the Beddit Sleep Tracker shows how you’ve slept. Scoring high enough gets you to the green zone and helps you learn what those good nights are made out of! You can easily dig deeper into your sleep details including your resting heart rate, respiration, sleep cycles, snoring and more. Beddit is placed right under the bed sheet, connected to your mobile device and all you need to do is sleep. Sleep tracking made as easy as stepping on a weight scale. The company has been working with sleep technology since 2007 specializing in ballistocardiography, a scientific method for measuring the physical micro-movements caused by cardiac activity.”
Relap.io – Russia
Founder: Serghei Shalaev
Year founded: 2014
Website: www.relap.io
Corporate email: support@relap.io
Relap.io is an advisory service tool which media can use to recommend readers relevant materials and articles through self-learning algorithms.
“A user comes to your website from a search board or a social media and you want him or her to stay and read as many articles as possible. In our widget, we show personalized content. Thus the user doesn’t go away, but clicks on a recommended article and continues reading further and further.”
NomadEd – Kazakhstan
Founder: Sabina Ismailova
Year founded: 2016
Corporate email: sabiesmile@gmail.com
NomadEd is an online learning system for people with disabilities and special education needs. The platform has special features that make it easy to use by people with different disabilities
Examples of some of those features include: OCR software to convert printed page into electronic text, built in screen reader software, so that the blind and visually impaired people would have the option to have all the information on the screen read to them; quality magnification software for the students with low vision, ability to change text colors for color-blind; videos having captions and subtitles for deaf students and software based keyboards for students from which one hand typing is possible.
“Any university will be able to get this platform in order to add distance education to their program. This way, students in any city would be able to enroll in the university they want and qualify to go. All the software and programs will be in English, Kazakh and Russian languages, specifically programmed for our country. There will also be a possibility to use this program in our neighbor countries in the future.”
Which companies do you think should make it into the next AlphaGamma Startups Overview edition? Let us know in the comment section below or via the contact form.
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