Wierzbowski Eversheds Sutherland advises EEC Magenta on investment in ChallengeRocket

• Poland

• Press_Releases

04-12-2019

The EEC Magenta funds made another investment, this time in the Wrocław startup ChallengeRocket.com, a platform linking specialists from the IT sector with employers. It is the fund’s third investment in the past five months, and Wierzbowski Eversheds Sutherland has had the privilege of advising on all of them.

EEC Magenta’s CVC and Starter funds were advised by Michał Karwacki, partner in charge of the PE/VC practice, and Małgorzata Deruś, Natalia Burchardt and Kamil Ciodyk from the same team.

The ChallengeRocket.com platform is a tool aimed at university students and graduates as well as HR managers of large companies. Its aim is to build an online community of talent currently expanding their technical skills. ChallengeRocket.com organizes periodic challenges—competitions for users of the platform. Their skills are identified based on their proposed solutions. The core of the innovation is the AI Talent Analytics module, automatically building a competency profile of the persons using the tool. This creates a database of verified specialists who can be directly recruited by HR departments. Challenges are also organized on the platform sponsored by specific firms conducting recruitment. A strong suit of ChallengeRocket.com is its use of artificial intelligence, so that the solutions proposed by users do not need to be verified manually by experts from the hiring firms.

The funding obtained from the EEC Magenta fund will be used for further commercial development of the platform, sales support, entry onto the British and American markets (the platform is already present on Continental European markets), and further R&D work. ChallengeRocket.com customers include such firms as the American tech powerhouse Nvidia, ING, Santander, PZU and Asseco, as well as universities and public-sector companies.

“Despite its relatively short presence on the market, ChallengeRocket.com stands out for its efficient organizational structure, enabling the founders to focus on strategic issues,” said Rafał Małecki, a partner at EEC Ventures. “This is a startup that has correctly diagnosed the competency gap as a problem on the market, and proposed a solution that has checked out in business practice. The organization already has experience working with large corporations, including on international markets. For this reason the EEC Magenta fund decided to invest PLN 3.2 million in ChallengeRocket.com. ChallengeRocket.com has many significant honors to its credit, including awards from the ABSL gala and European Startup Days, and recognition in the category of Startup Session Elite at the Krynica Economic Forum. The firm also won the international Facebook Global Challenge competition, which is undoubtedly an argument for the soundness of our investment.”

EEC Magenta is the largest Polish CVC fund created by EEC Ventures together with PFR Ventures, NCBR and Tauron Polska Energia as part of the PFR NCBR CVC program.

The EEC Ventures group manages venture capital funds with a combined capitalization of PLN 210 million. EEC Magenta specializes in funding digitalization of the energy sector, industry, and the circular economy. The fund is managed by Rafał Małecki, Voytek Siewierski and Konrad Sitnik. The partners have extensive experience on the Polish, European and American venture capital and private equity markets. The team have been cooperating for over 12 years and have completed a range of successful transactions.

This is not the first EEC Magenta transaction carried out with the support of our law firm. The EEC Magenta fund has previously added two startups to its portfolio: TakeTask, a platform for managing corporate tasks, which received funding of above PLN 2 million, and Reliability Solutions, which creates predictive diagnostic systems for modern industry, with funding of above PLN 13 million. The ChallengeRocket.com platform is the third company in which the fund has invested. All of the investments to date are part of EEC Magenta’s strategy based on funding solutions involving automation, roboticization, and increased efficiency of enterprises.

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