Eleven Capital

Sky high – Europe’s first drone cargo airline gets ready to take off

roberta — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:01:04 +0000

The post Sky high – Europe’s first drone cargo airline gets ready to take off appeared first on Eleven Capital.

Businessmap Wins Forbes’ Company of 2024 Award in Information and Communication Technology Sector

roberta — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 14:53:17 +0000

The post Businessmap Wins Forbes’ Company of 2024 Award in Information and Communication Technology Sector appeared first on Eleven Capital.

After €10M from EIC Dronamics Is Preparing Its Commercial Launch in Greece

roberta — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 13:56:01 +0000

The post After €10M from EIC Dronamics Is Preparing Its Commercial Launch in Greece appeared first on Eleven Capital.

Ayo on Forbes: These Circadian Rhythm Glasses Revolutionized My Mornings

roberta — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 13:51:41 +0000

The post Ayo on Forbes: These Circadian Rhythm Glasses Revolutionized My Mornings appeared first on Eleven Capital.

Sensika Technologies Secures Fresh Investment as It Gears up for IPO

roberta — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 13:46:21 +0000

The post Sensika Technologies Secures Fresh Investment as It Gears up for IPO appeared first on Eleven Capital.

The journey of the modern-day Wright brothers disrupting the norm

roberta — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:52:43 +0000

The journey of the modern-day Wright brothers disrupting the norm

Blog

The “Black Swan” theory has been developed and popularized by the Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The term refers to an unexpected event of large magnitude that disrupts the current norm and knowledge of what is possible and plays a dominant role in history.

Back in 2014 Svilen and Konstantin Rangelovi embarked on a journey to create a new type of unmanned cargo airplane addressing the mid-mile delivery demand. They named it The Black Swan. At first, it didn’t sound possible, but they keep proving it is. And on December 7, after 7 years of hard-work and growing long beards, the two brothers showed to the world that the Black Swan exists and is on its way to revolutionize cargo and logistics.

Before the big day of the unveiling we met with Svilen, co-founder and CEO of Dronamics, and took a trip down memory lane. We remembered the early days when they used to make a mess with mechanical parts at Eleven’s shared office, we analyzed some of the major milestones in their journey and we looked at the exciting developments which the future holds for Dronamics.

📍Where it all started - transporting Bulgarian cheese and improving the supply chain of developing countries

The idea of the Black Swan was born seven years ago, when Svilen and his brother Konstantin, who was in the Netherlands at that time, were talking over the phone. Konstantin was asking his brother when he would visit him so that he could bring some Bulgarian cheese and got a challenging reply – “Since you are the engineer, why not invent a drone that can ship it for you?”. At the time, small drones for hobby use were beginning to gain popularity, while ecommerce giants like Amazon were entering the field to do last-mile deliveries. But the two brothers asked themselves – why is no one addressing the middle-mile problem? After all, that’s where there are fewer regulatory and public acceptance hurdles and the technology for bigger aircraft is already largely known and validated.

Then they did their research and realized that this is a huge unserved need. They also found out that there is plenty of economic research demonstrating that improving its supply chain was the single best thing a developing country could do. And that’s when they saw the true potential of this technology – to enable economic opportunity to be more evenly distributed geographically.

“From day one we knew that this is what we want to do for the rest of our lives. On the first day of Eleven’s program, my brother said he is not going to shave until we get the drone flying and I decided to support him and not shave either. That’s why we have these awful 7-year-old beards now – and we hate beards! This demonstrates how stubbornly we believe in Dronamics.”

📍The early days with Eleven

“Eleven shared the same fate with us from day one and were among our loudest ambassadors and advocates, connected us to many of our future investors, and helped us become what we are today. They have been with us for the longest and had a reckless dedication from the beginning.”

Dronamics was at a very early stage when they received their first investment from Eleven in 2014. The founders had preliminary designs for the airplane, which they had validated with their advisors, while on the business side they had done extensive research and had a business plan. The brothers’ focus during Eleven’s program were the two most important numbers for the Black Swan: the 350 kg of cargo it can transport over 2,500 km of distance.

During these early days, Svilen and his brother bought the first engine for the aircraft – a second-hand Subaru Impreza WRX engine and they brought it to “The Roof” – the big shared office Eleven had back then. Svilen remembers with nostalgia:

“There were all these software startups with their fancy Macs and in the middle of the office a crane holding a 150 kg engine with its cables all over the place. It was inspiring to see how different teams are approaching similar challenges be it from marketing, company building, branding or engineering. It’s a ton of great memories we have.”

Svilen’s advice to early-stage founders is to start from what they think will always be true. This is how he and his brother established the core principles Dronamics is built on. A specific example in their case is that cargo transport is a market where the price will always be the number one determinant of who gets a contract. Therefore, their task was to create a new airplane that meets that principle. Another principle is that for it to be cheap, it needs to be small in size so that it can land at more locations that are not necessarily the big airports.

As a founder you need to start lining up what you hold to be true today and what you think will still be true 10 years from now. However, you also have to keep your ears to the ground and see if some of these conditions change. You have to be ready to forget about the ego, the sunk cost, or years of development and long beard, and just adapt.

📍The route to 40 angel investors and how to survive when low on cash

After the Demo Day of Eleven, the two brothers applied to pitch at the startup competition of Pioneers Festival (one of the most prominent tech conferences at the time) and were among the 15 startup founders chosen to present in front of investors. The competition winner 1st place prize was a potential investment by the Austrian VC firm Speedinvest. Long story short, Svilen and Konstantin won 1st place and this way secured their second institutional investor.

Dronamics’ fundraising journey is slightly different from the rest of the startups out there. Their product is not common for a typical early-stage VC fund, so throughout the years the founders have also spoken to numerous angel investors. Today, they have 40 individual investors on board but actually have pitched to thousands over the years and have heard hundreds of NOs. Svilen’s advice to founders for finding the right investor is to just be 100% open and frank about where you currently are and what are your future plans. You may need to speak to 1000 investors and that means you need to be ready to hear over 950 rejections.

Svilen remembers that Dronamics funding in their early days used to resemble throwing a pebble on the surface of a lake – as long as the pebble keeps going, it keeps bouncing off, if it stops going, it sinks. He and his brother never stopped going, even when their cash was really low or zero.

“You have to be resourceful in the early days. If a mechanical part you need is too expensive, you find it cheaper. If your warehouse needs a ventilation system and other companies give you a quote for €5,000-10,000, you go out there and you build it on your own for €500. If you need a certain tool, but don’t have the money to buy it, you try to make it yourself or borrow it. Building a startup requires creative decisions.“

📍First prototypes and a team of 100 people

Dronamics had their first small-scale flight with a 1/10 scale model back in 2015. They learned a lot so the team continued working on a 1/4 scale model. A few years later in 2018, the test campaign with this larger size airplane also turned out a success and it validated the aerodynamics, avionics communication center, and the performance. The team had met key targets and knew they were ready to start building the full-blown plane. This is also the moment when they had to move yet again to another location as they needed more space. Dronamics’ new home (where you can find them today) was the former DHL warehouse next to the Sofia Airport, which they converted into an office and a workshop.

Right around 2018, Svilen and Konstantin started thinking more about the corporate structure of the company, the talent growth, and creating a more streamlined framework of the organization. They had to focus on the team, learn how to structure operations, how to recruit new people, and decide what talent they needed. Are they building a team of champions or a champion team? In simple terms, it is two-sided self-selection, Svilen shares.

“You find the right kind of people who believe in the same kind of future you believe in. You don’t need every single smart person in the world, there are too many of them anyway.”

More focus on structure, talent and processes since 2018 proved to be a good decision, because over the past year, Dronamics’ team grew from 20-25 people to close to 100, distributed around the globe with, among many, a Chief Operations Officer based in Hong Kong, Chief People Officer in New York, and Chief Legal Officer in the UK.

The founders’ grand vision is to become a leading aircraft manufacturer and operator, in terms of units of aircraft built and operated. Dronamics aims to democratize air cargo as we know it by building smaller aircraft on a large scale that would be easy to deploy and operate in any geography.

“We see the potential to build Dronamics as a globally recognised brand that could eventually list on a major stock exchange as a public company.”

Want to follow Dronamics’ journey? Keep an eye on their website for the latest news – https://www.dronamics.com/

Sky high – Europe’s first drone cargo airline gets ready to take off

October 15, 2024

Businessmap Wins Forbes’ Company of 2024 Award in Information and Communication Technology Sector

October 12, 2024

The post The journey of the modern-day Wright brothers disrupting the norm appeared first on Eleven Capital.

From Idea to Exit – The Journey of Metrilo

roberta — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 06:22:57 +0000

Did you hear the news? The #Oneof11 eCommerce SaaS startup Metrilo was acquired by the French company Sendinblue, one of the world’s fastest-growing digital marketing platforms. The deal marks the first exit of Eleven Capital.

In order to learn more about the progress of Metrilo so far, how it all started, and the lessons learned throughout the journey, we talked to Murry Ivanoff, CEO and founder of the company.

The inception of the product and Metrilo’s early days

Metrilo is an all-in-one analytics CRM, and email marketing platform, which gives online merchants all the insights they need to make data-driven marketing decisions, while the CRM and email functionalities help them act on that information.

The idea for Metrilo was born 7 years ago, shortly after Murry returned to Bulgaria from Silicon Valley. He and Peter Iliev founded the company with the sole mission of helping eCommerce merchants grow based on their own data, which they weren’t utilizing at that point.

Back in 2014 analytics software such as Mixpanel and Kissmetrics were on the rise – enabling companies to measure funnels, metrics, and every KPI that matters to their business. However, there were two major challenges present, Murry points out.

“First – analytics can only give you the answers if you know the questions you want to ask. Most companies do not really have assumptions about their business or the specific KPIs that they would like to improve. And second – even if you know what you need, the integration process was long and painful.”

Murry and Peter accepted these two challenges and focused on building a product that could be integrated with one click and could give you the answers AND the questions that you should be asking about your business.

Murry’s goal when founding the company was to build the ultimate plug-and-play analytics solution for eCommerce SMBs and to help them compete with the “Amazons” in their fields. However, soon after the start of Metrilo, the customers started requesting to be able to act on the data and segmentation it was providing them with. So, the company’s vision grew into being a general growth platform for eCommerce brands – providing not only analytics but also active engagement tools like email campaigns and marketing automation. Today, Murry is positive that Metrilo’s team has managed to achieve this vision in the past 7 years.

And although the meaning of the word “success” usually changes for startup founders with the growth of their companies, for Murry the meaning of success back in 2014 and now stays the same. “Success meant watching our customers spend hours every day in our product and seeing them succeed in turning their venture around. This hasn’t changed, we were just doing it at a larger scale every year”, he shares. Metrilo’s team decided to partner with Sendinblue precisely because they saw it as an opportunity to have a massive impact on the SMBs out there compared to continuing to run as an independent company that’s a smaller player on the market.

The challenging journey and the stressful New Year’s Eve of 2020

We know that the road to success doesn’t have shortcuts. So Metrilo’s team had to go through some obstacles and challenges before reaching the big milestone of partnering up with Sendinblue. Murry vividly remembers one of them.

“Holiday season 2020, the date was December 31st. Both Bulgarian company cards which we were using had weekly spending limits, which we quickly reached because of software tools and services renewals. We were using the same payment method for our email delivery bill to a large US corporation, so the payment just didn’t go through. We had an agreement for them to wait until the first week of 2021 to re-try the payment and it would go through without any issues. However, their system shut down our account automatically on December 31st and more than 1000 companies around the world couldn’t send their New Year’s Eve campaigns. I pretty much spent the whole New Year’s Eve trying to figure out a solution and enable our customers to get access to the service they are paying us for. Of course, nobody could resolve our issue as all decision-makers in these suppliers were on a holiday. Luckily, I managed to find the home phone number of the CEO of this really, really, really large US company and after talking to his wife I managed to get a hold of him. Yes, he did resolve the issue but as you can guess he was extremely angry at me for calling him home. Our customers, luckily, barely noticed as New Year’s Eve had only passed for approximately 10% of our customers at that point.”

It’s all about the customers, your team and the partners around you. Lessons learned

Yes, such stressful situations happen to founders but the tricky part is how to get out of them successfully and to remember the moral of the story. Murry’s unforgettable New Year’s Eve story leads us to the lessons learned by overcoming the challenges along the way. And here are the three most important ones he learned since founding the company:

First – your team is the most important asset that you have. Making sure everybody is on the same page and chasing the same mission is vital.
Second – it is all about the customer and making sure everybody understands who our customers are and what are the problems we’re trying to solve for them.
And third – you can’t succeed without having partners around you – being investors, agencies, other companies or whatever fits your mission.

Thanks to these lessons learned, as of 2021, Metrilo’s customers look like this:

Merchants using Metrilo in 35+ countries globally

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However, the biggest challenge for Murry and the team is realising and accepting that they won’t be able to make a serious dent in the universe by themselves and deciding to join forces with a bigger company to get where they want to be. Which leads us to Metrilo’s exit journey.

The Exit

The acquisition itself wasn’t something coincidental or a matter of luck. The two companies have met before a couple of times, just like they do with many other players on the market. Sendinblue is not the first company that Metrilo’s team talked to in the past few years regarding a strategic partnership. However, it is the one that has made the most sense for them since they view the market in a similar way and have a common mission – giving the SME founders all the tools they need to succeed in competing with the big guys in their respective fields. At first, the two teams had conversations about a possible common feature but during these talks, they realized that they were on the same page and that their vision and goals align perfectly.

From this point, “the exit journey” of Metrilo has been pretty straightforward. “Sendinblue wanted to focus on eCommerce for their existing and new customers and we have a really good eCommerce solution. The process was extremely straightforward and easy, which shows that we were all on the same page since starting the M&A process,” Murry shares. Metrilo has managed to close the deal within less than 3 months once they had reached the decision that this acquisition is the right way to go.

Now that the exit is already a fact, it will bring Metrilo access to more businesses with a factor of hundreds, which is extremely exciting for the team. “Other than a bigger market opportunity, Sendinblue is helping us with lots of expertise and resources, which are really helping us achieve what we always wanted to,” adds Murry. The team is currently implementing Metrilo within the Sendinblue product and is aiming to launch a 360-degree solution in 2022.

The post From Idea to Exit – The Journey of Metrilo appeared first on Eleven Capital.

Eleven Capital Officially Announces Upcoming IPO and Publishes Prospectus. Here’s What We Learn From It

webdesh — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:23:12 +0000