This Croatian startup’s beginnings come from Zagreb and it first became well known back in 2014 as the first startup attract a large investment from outside of the Republic of Croatia.
As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 12th of April, 2019, the Croatian startup Bellabeat received an investment from AOL Ventures in the amount of 14.2 million dollars, the equivalent of 12.5 million euros. It’s not the biggest investment to be received by a Croatian startup last year, as that remains marked by Porsche’s entrance into the co-ownership of Rimac Automobila for 18.7 millions euros, but it remains the second largest. Bellabeat has so far kept this massive investment secret.
AOL is one of the three largest Internet service providers in the United States of America. The company is part of the large Verizon group, which owns a number of popular media outlets including The Huffington Post, Engadget, TechCrunch, and MapQuest. In the group is also the former Yahoo and the AOL Desktop software solution.
Croatia’s Bellabeat underwent restructuring half a year before the investment took place, at the end of 2017 and in early 2018. The company then let a number of its employees go. Sandro Mur, co-founder and director of Bellabeat, subsequently announced that he currently has a total of fifty employees and plans to increase this number to seventy. At that time, the Croatian company’s focus was on establishing an office across the Atlantic over in New York. The company has developed a range of high-tech products for women, from jewellery to smart water bottles, and plans to deal with artificial intelligence in the health preservation sector.
Five years ago, the founders of Bellabeat, Sandro Mur and Urška Sršen, set the bar very high for Croatian startups. They received a record 4.5 million dollar investment from a number of well-known investors. Among them were actress Jessica Alba, the creator and leading developer of Google Earth, Paul Buchheit, the founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, one of the hundred richest people, Nicolas Berggruen, and one of the most famous investors in the Silicon Valley and one of the very first to have invested in Google and PayPal, Ron Conway.
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Click here for the original article by Bernard Ivezic for Poslovni Dnevnik
