December 21 (SeeNews) - Croatian smart street equipment producer Include said it targets to raise at least 5 million euro ($5.6 million) in equity investments in Series B financing expected to take place at the end of 2022 at the earliest.
“We have several more quarters to stabilise the challenges in the supply chain, to boost the production capacities and to raise the monthly revenue to a level seen appropriate for companies planning Series B financing,” the company's CEO Ivan Mrvos told SeeNews in an emailed interview on Monday.
The company will use the funding for further growth, to scale out sales and to open an office in the US, where it expects to achieve strong sales and where currently it is not present, Mrvos also said.
Include focuses on solving key city and municipality issues, from waste management and air quality monitoring to management of public assets. Its most popular products are solar-powered benches equipped with USB and wireless chargers. Some of them are equipped with an advertising display and surveillance cameras, and all light up in the evening.
Along with equity financing, the company is open for investment tranches and does not exclude other investment opportunities. Regarding the Series B financing, the company is working on options offered by Europe's flagship innovation funding programme, the EIC accelerator, and is in talks with several foreign venture capital funds.
Currently, the company is in a pre-series B funding round, in which is aims to raise 400,000 euro ($453,000) in fresh capital on global equity funding and trading platform Funderbeam. So far, it has raised 69% of target funding, or 277,000 euro, with eight days left for investors to join the fundraising round in which the minimum investment is set at 250 euro, according to data published on the website of Funderbeam.
“The aim of the pre-series B funding round is to provide smaller investment to scale out the production processes to meet the growing demand and to successfully lead the company towards the Series B,” Mrvos added.
The Zagreb-based unit of Funderbeam, Funderbeam South-East Europe was established in 2016 as a 20:80 joint venture of the Zagreb Stock Exchange (ZSE) and Estonia's Funderbeam Ventures OU to provide cross-border services to investors and startups. Last year, the ZSE raised its stake in Funderbeam South-East Europe to 30% from 20%.
($ = 0.887 euro)