Icanpreneur, a Bulgarian startup on a mission to significantly improve the odds of success of technology startup founders, announced that it has raised €200,000 angel round at a €2.5M post-money valuation. The company is building a global digital accelerator SaaS platform that enables aspiring and early tech entrepreneurs to go from idea, through investment, to product/market fit by following a practically proven guided entrepreneurial journey. Icanpreneur’s initial focus is on aspiring tech entrepreneurs that are already successful as employees and will help them smoothen the transition to entrepreneurship by starting in their spare time.
“Entrepreneurship, as predominantly practiced today, relies a lot on gut-feel and luck and the success rate demonstrates that clearly. Only 1 in 10 companies succeed and typically the failure happens before reaching product/market fit. Our goal is to change that and provide a guided experience where the tech entrepreneurs will be able to follow actionable steps and achieve systematic instead of accidental success.”, said Vesko Kolev, Founder & CEO of Icanpreneur.
The €200,000 round, which is the company’s first outside funding, is joined by some of the most successful and respected innovators and entrepreneurs of the Bulgaria’s IT ecosystem, including Svetozar Georgiev (Co-Founder of Telerik, Telerik Academy & Campus X), Mihail Stoychev & Georgi Petrov (Co-Founders of SMSBump), Zoran Arsovski (Founder of VertoDigital), Faris Sweis (Co-Founder of Sentur), Georgi Atanasov (Head of AR/VR at Progress), Emil Tabakov (Senior Product Manager at Coursera). The mix of investors with their unique domain expertise, product experience, reputation and relationships make this angel round among one of the strongest to date.
“It is amazing how many business processes are smoothly facilitated and automated by software today. At the same time, the critical journey of a startup – from idea to Product/Market fit – still lives in books, articles and TedEx videos. We are here to change that. Icanpreneur will guide the process for entrepreneurs, giving them in-context insights and thus helping them focus on innovation and market validation,” said Svetozar Georgiev.
The funding will be invested in building the initial version of the platform. So far, the company worked on clarifying their vision, validated their initial ideas and built a strong team of top ex-Telerik members – Vesko Kolev (Founder & CEO), Katelina Boykova (Chief Design Officer), Kristian Kirov (Chief Technology Officer) and Andrey Mladenov (Chief Information Officer). Each of them has more than 15 years of experience in building large scale products and business systems with great user experience. In the next 6-12 months the team will be working to bring the initial version of the platform to the market. Today, the company is also announcing their Insiders Program – exclusive access of 100 early adopters that will help shaping the future platform. The Insiders Program and the platform is expected to have a significant positive effect on the Bulgarian ecosystem.
