TheStartup.eu

Note: This is a post I wrote on TechCrunch Europe a few days ago.

Online password management startup Passpack, recently announced it’s follow-on funding. The company raised €350,000 in June 2008 and now previous investor Zernike Meta Ventures is topping that with additional €74,000.

This new capital injection will enable the company to finish the development of their product and start to actively market it. There is a great blog post about this new round in wich they explain what the funds will be used for. +1 for transparency.

The Rome-based company is not looking for venture capital until it hits profitability. Apparently, the new round was determined by reaching a major milestone in development and user-base.

The founders, an italo-american couple: Tara Kelly and Francesco Sullo that I recently met with in the attempt to create a roman startup community, stated that their revenue from premium packages is growing at a 2 digit percentage each month.

While this is great news for the italian startup ecosystem, it still raises many questions and doubts. €74,000, really? Let’s analyze the situation: Passpack has a working and cheap product, revenue growing every month, a committed team raising it like a child, great international press coverage and recently launched a desktop version to take on its competitors.Even thought the company is not looking for VC money right now, I still think it deserves some faith from investors.

If Passpack raises this modest amount what can other italian seed-stage startups aim for?

Warburg Pincus, a US-based private equity firm, has acquired an 8.8% stake in Munchen-based Kontron AG, a designer and manufacturer of embedded computer systems.

The deal is valued at €38.6 millions.

It’s well known that people working in a startup environment are usually very passionate about what they do, but Poken UK’s Country Director Renate Nyborg took it to a whole new level with this “Have faith in Poken” video posted on her Tumblr.

Too good not to post it.

The UK looks to make its european leadership stronger, after the launch of PROfounders Capital earlier this month, yesterday news broke about a new £50m fund.

Tim Levene, the son of Lloyd’s of London chairman Lord Levene, has been backed by Lord Rothschild and RIT Capital Partners.

The investments will be targeted on growth and development businesses and will be in the £3m-£15m range. Levene only plans on investing in businesses that could benefit from his experience and insights.

Tim Levene has an interesting background: in 1997, after leaving Bain & Company, he launched the Fresh ‘n’ Smooth juice bars selling the company a few years later. In 1999 he founded Flutter, a betting website, later acquired by Betfair in 2001.

Richard Matthews will be the other partner of the fund.

High-Tech Gründerfonds, one of the most active venture capital firms in the german startup scene, just announced a half-million euros investment into software startup ReCoTech, a developer of IT-based solutions to optimise strategic large scale office space allocations.

The new capital will be used to finish the product and enter the marketplace with a license base revenue model.

“ReCoTech’s mathematically innovative algorithms and its large efficiency potential in construction projects convinced us to invest”, says Dr. Björn Momsen, Investment Manager at High-Tech Gründerfonds. “As indicated by the first successful customer projects on the way, ReCoTech’s services are in huge demand, especially for user managed office buildings.”

ReCoTech’s customers are companies and organisations with large office and administration facilities, whom will benefit from their software thanks to the calculation of large scale and strategic office space allocation planning. This enables the fast generation of different variants with customized settings concerning individual demand, desired adjacencies, complete or partial preferences for individual departments and many more.

“The early practical applications already demonstrate the enormous potential to save space and resources”, says Michael Marchionini, CEO of ReCoTech GmbH. “It is interesting to note that almost all customers intend to reduce CO2 emissions as well as costs and recognize the dispassionate objectivity of the resulting plan as an immediate non monetary benefit. The latter contributes in many ways to the eventual implementation of potentially controversial decisions.”

Earlier this morning, online music startup Spotify announced on its blog a new iPhone application.

There is a video showing how the application works and I must say it looks very promising. I think the killer feature will be the “Offline Playlists”  that will let you cache music while you have a wireless connection and then listen to it wherever you are.

Mobile access will only be available to premium members, so this will be a nice incentive for users who haven’t signed up for a paid plan yet. The iPhone app has just been submitted to the Apple app store and we’re all eager to see if it will be accepted.

Take a look at their demo: