There’s a new kid on the block – the Estonian tech startup scene. Cloutex, which launched its service in spring 2013, has closed a US$600,000 seed round from United Partners, SmartCap and EstBan business angels. The former Skype Estonia General Manager and angel investor, Tiit Paananen, is also part of the round.
Cloutex, set up by Estonian Peeter Mark and Dane Soren Hejnfelt, enables small and medium-sized businesses to link and bi-directionally sync their usage of multiple third party cloud-based software services, such as e-marketing, CRM (customer relationship management) and accounting tools. Its idea is to keep customer data up-to-date across multiple systems – it will automatically synchronise data across all the integrated systems and checks for new updates as often as every few minutes.
The firm, which claims to have had a week-on-week growth rate of +15% since its launch, currently supports nine third-party services that it can sync data from and to, and is planning to use part of its new seed funding to expand that number out to hundreds. It is also planning to open an office in Silicon Valley and relocate part of the business there, but retaining its development office in Estonia.
I
Cover image: goaleurope.com.
I guess it’s the usual trend. Get money from investors in Estonia, create jobs in the US. Same thing happened with Grabcad and Zeroturnaround.