Invest Europe’s Report: “The Acceleration Point: Why Now is the Time for European Venture Capital” has been released lately to cover the progress of the European ecosystem and its global position and the unprecedented rise of the European tech industry.
Two of our portfolio companies have recently been awarded in important regional competitions. Parkanizer and Piktorex – both startups growing within our LQT Fund in cooperation with Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju (the National Centre of Research and Development) have been recognized in their regions for their accomplishments.
As it is still quite young, Polish innovations and VC industry needs knowledge, good practices and worldwide network to keep up the global pace and use its great potential. We decided that the cradle of the industry is the best place to get them from. Palo Alto, California, Kauffman Fellows – Class 22. That’s where our Marcin P. Kowalik spent a week of his time in June. Our Managing Partner is actually the second Black Pearls VC team member to take part in the Program, as Ewa Treitz succesfully completed her course last year.
For the first time, company from Poland won the international Startup Europe Awards, promoted by the European Commission. Wojciech Syroski, founder of Robocamp, received the award in Brussels in June. 84 startups from 14 diferent countries participated in the finals. We are writing about this, as the victors have common past with Black Pearls VC, being one of the first companies our Managing Partner, Marcin P. Kowalik, decided to invest in.
We had a great pleasure of joining the infoShare's Digital Healthcare Hackathon. Our Venture Partner Piotr Pągowski was a Jury member and CFO Hubert Szczołek was a business development and financing expert. After two days of working with great startups our representatives decided to distinguish some teams and their projects (StethoMe, Laparo and CardioCube) for their compliance with our Life Quality Technologies principles and invite them for further talks regarding future cooperation. Black Pearls VC supports innovations improving the quality of human life to address most pressing social changes, particularly within the scope of demographics (aging societies), labour and business. With our LQT Fund II recently established with support of National Centre for Research and Development, we are looking for top-quality R&D projects to develop and commercialize.
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Another step in the implementation of Black Pearls VC growth strategy has been taken. We have become a member of Invest Europe (previously EVCA) – the association representing Europe’s private equity, venture capital and infrastructure sectors, as well as and their investors. The organisation is guarding the industry’s professional standards, demanding accountability, good governance and transparency from the members.
When Black Pearls VC is expanding the team – it always comes to the big names. We are proud to announce that Piotr Pągowski has joined us recently as a Venture Partner. Piotr will strenghten our potential in the field of innovative IT projects development, bringing elite expertise and experience that he has gained at Intel, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on international level. His assets will complement Black Pearls VC international expansion strategy. A graduate of Warsaw University of Technology Faculty of Electronics, Piotr Pągowski has been associated with the IT industry since 1993. He started his career at Baza and Westwood. Since 1995, he was working for Intel, where he was responsible for development strategy with sales and marketing for Central Eastern Europe region. From 2006 to 2011 was working for Microsoft where he subsequently held the positions of Country
Read MoreSeptember 2016 will be long remembered as a very important day for the Polish space sector industry. Two of our initiatives aimed at developing space technology projects had their great finale at Gdańsk Science and Technology Park, where Space3ac and POSITON programmes Demo Day was held on the 8th of September.
Space3ac DemoDay vistorious team with Black Pearls VC Alex Lubanski and Wojciech Drewczynski.
We are here to direct Polish startups down the path of their development, assists them until they achieve a global-scale success. With a view to continuous improvement, we too must expand our team’s strength in international relations. Meet Bogdan from Ukraine, who has just recently won his place in our crew with a praiseworthy talent and determination.
Eight teams have made it to the final phase of the space industry accelerator Space3ac. They now have one and a half months to brush up their projects and prepare a presentation for investors. The winners will take 50 thousand PLN to spend on scientific research and will have a chance to obtain investments worth even as much as 2 million PLN(approx. 450 thousand EUR).
