Flagship gathering of #Estonianmafia – Latitude59 took place last week. While attendees are busy following up with each other, organizers followed-up with us, sharing the best photos, facts and numbers:
The winner – Lithuanian marketplace for 3D designs CG Trader received over €30 000 in prizes, including investment from EstBAN, scholarship to attend Blackbox Connect in Silicon Valley powered by Microsoft and Hedman Partners and service credit from Silicon Valley law firm ReedSmith. CG Trader already has $500,000 annual revenue and 180,000 users. The team is now raising a $3 million Series A round to grow. They have already received previous backing from Practica Capital and Intel Capital. Recently the team won LOGIN2015 pitch competition in Vilnius.
Collaborative virtual whiteboard Deekit landed 2nd. The startup already has Google, Apple, TransferWise and other big names among their customers. Currently raising a $400,000 seed round to grow.
3rd place went to Latvian flight simulation for sales training BranchTrack. The company was also the most mentioned pitching startup on Twitter. BranchTrack currently has names like KPMG and HP as their customers and is syndicating a €500,000 seed round to expand.
Two more interesting facts about Latitude59 pitch contest winners:
(1) Coincidentally, there was one winner from each Baltic state
(2) Contrary to globally discussed undervaluation of women in tech, 1 and 2 places at Latitude59 went to two great female pitchers: Dalia Lasaite (CG Trader) and Kaili Kleemeier (Deekit).
You can read more about other finalists here.
Another interesting team we met was Estonian ‘I can move’ founded by Tallin Technical University inventor Heigo Molder and making wheelchairs faster, safer and easier to maintain. They also have a happy user on board the team, helping them develop the product:
There was also a Belarussian startup Kuoll making a real-time visual debugger. They record all user sessions on your website and delete them right away if there are no errors. If there are errors, though, they send a detailed visual report to your developer, highlighting the parts in code that were in action where the error happened. In that way, you can fix that error on your payment page right away, not when hungreds of customers leave because of it.
Another interesting project was Hungarian Wearanotch – a sensor system for sports that lets you record, view and improve your performance. They have successfully gone through HAX hardwarre accelerator in China. Now they are brushing up to enter the US market.
The most beloved speaker at the event seemed to be Mate Rimac from Croatia, the Founder & CEO of world’s ONLY profitable electric car company Rimac Automobili. After his speech unveiling all the ups and down of his daring Mate’s daring journey, the audience literally celebrated his success with a long standing ovation.
A great quote we took home from Mate’s speech:
‘We had no money to buy car parts from suppliers like everyone else did. This is the sole reason we are still alive: we made unique parts ourselves.’
We appreciate Latitude59 as the place place where makers from #Estonianmafia with big dreams get together, connect and overcome impossible challenges together. They said they’ll be happy to see you next year:
Useful links:
More photos from the event: https://www.facebook.com/Latitude59/photos_stream
Twitter stream for #Latitude59: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23latitude59&src=typd
Twitter stream for #Estonianmafia: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23estonianmafia&src=typd
They also promised to released video material from all session on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
