• Launched in 2021 by Grzegorz Tarczynski, Jacek Nijaki, Adnan Ahmic, and Sebastian Szczygiel, Gotiva provides a mobile app called Jigsaw Puzzle Universe. It enables content creators, including digital illustrators, photographers, and AI-content creators, to distribute digital images and earn money from generated revenue as users engage with the images in the form of jigsaw puzzles. 
• The app has already featured content contributed by over 200 creators from over 40 countries. Initially, the startup focused on graphical content, but in the future, the platform plans to support a variety of multimedia content types, with dedicated apps responsible for distribution and revenue generation. 
• The fresh investment round was led by the SMOK Ventures Fund II, one of the 20 most active Polish VC funds in H1 2023, according our ranking at AIN.Capital. Several co-investors including Estonian Big Bets (Anton Gauffin’s family office) and Poland’s Movens Capital also participated.

From pre-seed funding in 2022 to seed funding in December 2023, our journey has only just begun. Thank you to every Gotiva’s team member for their hard work and dedication, and to our investors for believing in us!

Sebastian Szczygiel, one of the co-founders of Gotiva, commented on the investment.

This round brings Gotiva’s total funding to €1.91 million, including a previously unannounced pre-seed round with contributions from Eric Seufert‘s Heracles Capital and 18 international angel investors.

• Rolla is a company aiming to build a gamified fitness platform that eliminates barriers to healthy lifestyle. The system combines two intertwined layers of progression: Levels (long-term) and Effort (daily), encouraging users by giving them short term rewards, while also helping them make long term progress.
• The company was founded by Igor Krezic, who founded another five companies that collectively generated over 400 jobs and more than €30 million in annual revenue.

“The two factors that led me to be part of Rolla were Igor Krezić and the importance of health in modern society. I have witnessed which entrepreneurial miracles Igor has created in the past, which are even more impressive considering where and under which circumstances they were built. At the same time, I strongly believe that a data-driven, healthy lifestyle will become ever more important for people around the world. I also see a lack of a proper comprehensive solution for assisting people to live such a healthy lifestyle. I am sure that Igor and his team are on the path of delivering just that,”

Mate Rimac comments.

• Mate Rimac, a renowned inventor and entrepreneur, is one of Rolla’s main investors. Apart from making investments, he founded Rimac Automobili and Greyp Bikes and is currently the CEO of the Rimac Group, Rimac Technology, and Bugatti Rimac.
• Hellen’s Rock is the other investor in this round. The firm backs unconventional founders and teams making significant strides in health and wellbeing, finance, education, and entertainment. It is a single family office founded by Sasha Dragic, a seasoned entrepreneur from the CEE region.
• The funding will help Rolla to further develop its platform. The company already released beta versions of its Rolla One and Rolla World apps for early adopters earlier this year, and plans the full launch in Q1 of 2024.

• HTEC was founded in September 2008 by Aleksandar Cabrilo and Dusan Kosic in Serbia. Now it is headquartered in San Francisco, with development centers across Eastern Europe, design and consultancy offices in the US, UK, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and development centers across Southeast Europe. 
• HTEC’s team now has more than 2,000 employees globally and provides product design and development, hardware and firmware engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, and scalable cloud platforms services.  
• Previously, in January 2022, HTEC raised $140 million from growth equity investment firm Brighton Park Capital. The funds helped to scale the company’s capacities to serve its growing global customer base through acquisitions and organic growth.
• Now, HTEC acquires Mistral Technologies, an IT solutions firm with over 300 experts in Bosnia and Herzegovina that provides Product Development as a Service. It was founded in 2011 by Mersed Camdzic in Sarajevo.

“After building a successful business for the last 12 years in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we realized that a partnership with HTEC Group would bring great value both to the market of Bosnia & Herzegovina and to our company,”

Mistral’s co-founder and CEO Mersed Camdzic commented on the deal.

• The acquisition is set to help Mistral to complement and expand HTEC’s experience in the field of financial technologies, telecommunications, multimedia and other key industries.