As Poslovni Dnevnik/Ana Blaskovic writes, the Solin company Include, which is very well known for its smart benches, is launching a new Funderbeam campaign. With a more modest amount when compared to some of the previous ones, this time it aims at between 400,000 and 1 million euros of capital, but with a great ambition – to overcome the shortage of chips.
“Over the last two years, we’ve been working on developing new solutions so that the company can move away from the bench story in the direction of new products for cities to solve specific problems, from waste to air quality measurement,” said Include’s founder Ivan Mrvos, who at just 26 years of age has done more than most.
”With this round of funding, we aim to overcome the global challenges that everyone has, including that of chips. We’d ensure that we can make whole chip boards within our own production, which would allow us to buy from several sources, which would significantly speed up our production process,” he said.
The Solin company Include currently has a “full order book until March” that includes more than a hundred products, smart benches and air quality metres. “It’s about 300,000 euros worth of sold good, but they’ve not been delivered yet. Until then, the situation should stabilise so that we can create a stock of products, so that when customers order, we can deliver them in a few days,” he explains. The latest Funderbeam campaign is their third in a row through that platform, and back in 2017 they became the first Croatian company on that platform.
In the year before the global coronavirus pandemic struck, they set a record for the largest Croatian campaign on that platform to date, with 1.5 million euros raised. The current round, a kind of ”pre-series B round”, is an overture to the large 5.5 million euro campaign planned for the end of 2022, about which they’re already in contact with venture capital funds.
The condition for this is to scale production and revenue up to the desired 200,000 euros per month (from the current around 110,000), which opens the door for talks with larger funds, and potentially in the future is a step towards opening the doors of the United States. The Solin company Include entered the entrepreneurial scene with Steora smart benches, and at the end of 2020, it set out in the direction of solving some of the biggest global challenges we currently face.
In addition to the recently introduced Aerys air quality measurement stations, this includes Terra bins that reduce waste collection by 80 percent. Today, Include exports to 59 countries and more than 500 cities around the world.
“Since Funderbeam started, Ivan Mrvos was the first person that Ivana Gazic and I identified as a good young person for Funderbeam. This is our third campaign in just four years, and the company’s valuation today stands at 17 million euros,” said leading investor Ivana Soljan.
“Ivan has exceeded all my expectations these years. I think that Include is one of the future large companies in this area that will become a global company “, she added, and so far she has invested almost 200,000 euros in the company.
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