PromoRepublic, a Finnish startup with Ukrainian roots, has secured €400,000 from a pool of investors: Finnish business angels Sampo Parkkinen and Pekka Koskinen, startup accelerator and fund Vendep, Finland's government agency Tekes, and Ukrainian fund Digital Future.
PromoRepublic offers a service that helps freelance marketers create content for social networks.
An initial €100,000 capital injection from Pekka Koskinen, Vendep and Tekes took place in September 2015, PromoRepublic co-founder and CEO Max Pecherskyi told Ukraine Digital News.
Pecherskiy expects to receive further support from Finnish Tekes: “After the startup reaches a certain level of income and number of clients, it automatically receives access to a €1.25 million follow-up funding to be spent on marketing and sales.”
Initially positioned as an all-in-one marketing service, the startup now focuses on ‘Calendar of Content Ideas,’ a feature that helps freelance marketers create “stunning social media posts” based on holidays, trends, events and more.
“We spent one month in San Francisco, Boston and New York and understood how this market works. We saw that reaching out to small businesses directly is very difficult, but at the same time we found a highly-developed segment of freelance marketers, so we decided to focus on this narrow segment by tailoring a product to their needs,” Pecherskyi said.
“In the U.S., the segment of software for freelancers is growing by 40 percent a year, and there’s plenty of space for new companies on this market. We’ve already got more than a hundred paying customers from America, even though we launched there very recently,” the startup entrepreneur added.
Communication with the U.S. customers and partners goes through a virtual office in Palo Alto.
The Finnish-Ukrainian company also aims to integrate with such large marketing services as Hootsuite, HubSpot, Buffer and others, which are already used by millions of marketers in the U.S.
PromoRepublic was founded in Kyiv in 2013 by serial entrepreneur Valeriy Grabko. In 2014, it established offices in Helsinki and Tallinn to build its own distribution channels in Eastern Europe, while keeping its production center in Kyiv.
Following its registration in Finland, the startup took part in Startup Sauna, which opened the way to receiving a grant from Tekes.
Early PromoRepublic investors include Ukraine’s Eastone Group, Swiss businessman David Lottenbach, Boston-based investor Semyon Dukach, Estonian investor Andrus Lauritz.
The startup’s backers can be found far beyond the conventional European Union and American markets.
“We enjoyed a €30,000 grant from (Chilean government agency) Start-Up Chile. This grant was offered to Valeriy when he relocated to Santiago de Chile for more than 6 months, got a residence permit there and participated in education programs for local entrepreneurs,” Pecherskyi told Ukraine Digital News.
The article was first published at Ukraine Digital News.
