StartupHighway Among the Best Achievers of 2014
On 5th February, 2015 Enterprise Lithuania held an event dedicated to the overview of 2014 Lithuanian startups and honoured the best performers of the year with meaningful awards. Luckily, we were among them!
The event started with a presentation of insights of the year 2014 based on results of a survey of 53 IT companies, carried out by Enterprise Lithuania and Startup Lithuania. The results proved that 2014 was a record breaking year for Lithuanian startups with stunning outcome of 46M EUR in investments, 405 employees working at startups and 130 newly established workplaces, and more than 2M EUR tax contribution to the state budget. Compared to 2013 startups attracted 34M EUR investments, employed 200 people and contributed 0,5M EUR of taxes to the state budget. That’s quite a difference!
The Overview of the past year results was followed by the awards of the most successful and prosperous teams. We are happy to announce that StartupHighway together with IMI.VC and Invest Lithuania has been honored with a significant award of “Partnership of the Year”. As Rokas Tamosiunas, StartupHighway CEO, said, “Partnership is a core of our values, we worked really hard to make this happen. We worked hard last year and we are working even harder this year to get us going faster” He continued, “We are particularly proud of this achievement, we’re still a team and we keep growing, we keep adding new partners”. Looking forward to the year 2015 we expect to surpass the previous year in influential accomplishments.
More awards were given to other bright Lithuanian startup community members. The Startup of the Year award was received by the prominently rising startup “Plague” which created an exceptional social network for viral information spread and has already received a massive interest in global media. Toyze, the platform for creation and printing of 3D personalized unique game characters, was awarded as “Growth of the Year”. Kaunas University of Technology has been nominated as “Academic Startup Community of the Year”. The university has demonstrated a great initiative to focus on the development of Lithuanian startup ecosystem during the year 2014. Furthermore, “The Investment of the Year” award went to Vinted for attraction of tremendous investment of 20M EUR from the leading global private equity and venture capital firm “Insight Venture Partners”. Venture capital firm “Practica Capital” received “The Investor of the Year” award for its investments of more than 6,5M EUR in 15 Lithuanian startups. And last but not least, the award of “Hardware Solution of the Year” was given to Integrated Optics who produce innovative integrated optical devices, power electronics and plasmonic substrates.
That’s a great sum up of the last year that will keep our entrepreneurship spirit high for the whole 2015!