You're reading: Richard Branson’s business accelerator to invest in Ukrainian energy-saving startup

A Ukrainian startup called Ecoisme has won a place in a UK based tech-acceleration program run by Richard Branson’s Virgin Media and U.S. Techstars, and is to get up to $120,000 in investment to develop its energy saving devices.

“Hooray!”
Ecoisme co-founder
Alexander
Diatlov
, wrote on his Facebook page on March 10. “On Sunday
(March 12) I’m going to the U.S. where (the news) will be
(officially) announced.”

According to
Diatlov, after the official announcement of all the winners, he and
co-founder Ivan
Pasichnyk
will take part in a three-month intense acceleration
program in London starting in April.


“This will give us access to the business network,” Diatlov told
the Kyiv Post. “Additionally, they will give us investments, which
will make it possible to accelerate production.”

Ecoisme designs
household sensors that look a bit like wireless Internet routers. The
devices track energy usage by domestic appliances, such as
refrigerators, or by the lights in the house. The data are then sent
to users’ smartphones along with energy-saving tips.

The Ukrainian
startup will be the only one from a CIS country to take part in the
business acceleration program, Ukrainian online tech journal AIN.UA
reported. In all, companies from 71 countries participated in the
program, but only 10 got through to its final stage.

The program,
Virgin
Media Accelerator
, is sponsored by venture capital company
Liberty Global, headquartered in Denver, CO. According to CrunchBase,
a website that highlights innovative companies, Liberty Global
typically invests between $2 million to $20 million in software,
video and games startups.

At the starting
stage, Liberty Global will give $20,000 to each company in the
program, and get 6 percent of their shares in return. According to
Pasichnyk, later the startups will be offered equity investments up
to $100,000 in exchange for an additional 4 percent of their shares.

Apart from money,
the companies will get a lesson on how to run their businesses from
UK business magnate Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Media Tom
Mokridzh, Peter Kelly, the managing director at Virgin Media
Business, Bruce Degn, the vice president of Liberty Global Ventures,
and experts from technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter,
Stripe and Twilio.

The Ecoisme team
was created in Kyiv in 2013 during a hackathon – an event in which
computer programmers and others involved in software and hardware
development thrash out and implement software ideas.

After that
hackathon, the team started working on their own and managed to
attract $100,000 in funding from T-Venture, the early-stage venture
arm of Deutsche Telekom. One of the terms of the deal was to
establish a corporate body with T-Venture’s subsidiary in Krakow,
Poland

Now half of the
Ecoisme team is working in Poland, and half in Ukraine.

Earlier this
year, Ecoisme won
development aid
at the 1991 open-source data incubator
competition, and its co-founder Pasichnyk was included in the Forbes
list of 30 the most successful people in Europe aged up to 30 years,
in the industry sector.

Read an interview
with him here.

Kyiv Post
staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached
at [email protected].
The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by Ciklum, Steltec
Capital
, 1World
Online
and SoftServe.
The content is independent of the donors.