As Bernard Ivezic/Novac writes, the Croatian startup Revuto has announced that it is entering an investment round with which it aims to become the holder of the fifth largest startup investment this year. The company’s ambitious plan is to raise a massive nine million euros in capital.
In the first quarter of this year, Croatian startups attracted more than a billion kuna in investments. The largest investment, from Porsche, was received by Rimac Automobili, followed by Endava’s acquisition of Five, the Menlo Ventures investment in Photomath, then Swisscom Ventures and their investment in Cognism, followed by the M + Group’s entry into the Croatian startup Bulb.
The Croatian startup Revuto would jump from a target of about 11 million US dollars and be just between Cognism with 12.5 million dollars and Bulb with 8.5 million dollars.
Revuto, launched by Josipa Majic and Vedran Vukman, is developing an application (app) that would manage an individual’s subscriptions – from Netflix to Apple and from Google to PlayStation, even including the likes of Tinder, Spotify and Asana. The idea is that on this mobile application, users will be able to manage their monthly subscriptions as they do with video or virtual machines. They could pause, cancel, pay, track and add, all in one place.
More will be known in the next ten or so days as the startup plans to officially present its investment round and start raising funds.
The Croatian startip Revuto was initially conceived for the payment of subscriptions, and therefore has an internal user reward system. It was this option that the Croatian startup launched at the beginning of last year, just before the pandemic struck, when it invited users to subscribe to its website and collect reward points, which can be exchanged for subscriptions, or so-called Revuto tokens. However, in order to be able to use them, it was of course necessary for the startup to launch a mobile application, which has been announced for the autumn of this year, ie after raising fresh capital.
Rewarding users is also important because the Croatian startup Revuto intends to compete with PayPal and Revolut with its functionality. Both parts of their popularity are due to the possibility that subscriptions can be managed through them in one place, but not even close to the level promised by Revuto.
So far, the wildly popular Revolut has gone the furthest here, as it allows you to leave credit card numbers that you have virtually created within Revolut’s application to various Internet services, which you can turn off or cancel at any time. This actually allows for unsubscriptions, as the online service can no longer be charged given that you have cancelled your ”virtual” card.
However, apart from the size of the new Revut investment round, the way in which it will be implemented is also of interest. This is the first major decentralised finance (DeFi) project in all of Croatia. DeFi, after the inital coin offering (ICO), which were the crypto counterparts of the IPO, went a step further.
Investors in DeFi seek earnings not only through tokens or cryptocurrencies, but also through the actual use of financial instruments that are created through DeFi. The Croatian startup Revuto has announced on its website that it plans to issue a REVU token on the Cardano blockchain and that it will have several interesting applications to boast of.
Cardano’s cryptocurrency, ADA, is the sixth largest in the world with a market capitalisation of more than 42.5 billion dollars. The top five are Bitcoin, Ether, Binance coin, Ripple and Tether.
The Croatian statup Revut’s interest in joining DeFi isn’t particularly surprising, as it experienced a big jump a couple of years ago. With 40 million dollars invested in such projects back in early 2019, it has exceeded 40 billion dollars to date. That’s why it remains the focus of investors’ interest in the crypto world today. However, it should not be forgotten that it is high-risk, that many compare the risk of investing in DeFi with that of ICOs, and that there are those who have been very badly burned because of DeFi projects.
How Revuto’s planned DeFi will fare remains to be seen, as they are still explaining their business model. They state that the average European consumer spends 130 euros a month on subscriptions, which is about five percent of their total monthly consumption.
”Almost a fifth of consumers never check their subscriptions, which is why half of them often pay for products and services that they either no longer use or do not consider valuable. Revuto, a Croatian startup whose mission is to completely redefine the experience of subscription management and save its clients time, energy and money, has achieved sensational success. With the strong support of Cardano, a blockchain platform, Revuto is entering the first token hall on that platform with the aim of raising eight million euros of capital,” they concluded from the startup.
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