By Luv el 28 January 2009
Seedcamp, founded by serial entrepreneur Saul Klein is growing and expanding its reach far and wide to support promising entrepreneurs in their quest to launch great businesses. Paris is the venue of the next Mini-Seedcamp on the 24th of February and startups from France, Benelux, Spain and Portugal are invited to apply. 20 seed stage tech startups will be selected to attend an intensive day of presentations, panel discussions and 1-to-1 mentoring sessions with a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from all over Europe, including Saul himself. Teams have till 9th of February to apply. That’s less than 2 weeks from today.
We thought it would be interesting to ask Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp, some difficult questions. Here are the easy answers:
Carry on reading »
By Luv el 27 December 2008
Jose del Moral writes about it: we now have a Zopa or Prosper for Spain, it’s called Comunitae and it has just received 2 million euros of investment from the fund Entrinnova.
The founders of Comunitae are Jose Miguel Rotaeche and Arturo Cervera, two ex directors of BBVA who since June of this year are working to bring to Spain the model of P2P bank or bank 2.0, whatever you would like to call it. The launch of this community of loans between individuals is scheduled for mid 2009.
Comunitae will do an analysis on each one of the loan requests and will classify them in function of their risk. The lenders will bid for the loan requests as for them participating in the community is an opportunity to invest. The managers of the community recommend the lenders to diversify their investments by categorizing loans on different levels.
The service of Comunitae also is considering helping non profit entities to obtain funding in favourable conditions, and for that they will be creating the option of groups.
Without doubt we are looking at a very ambitious project here, with an important investment. We will be keeping an eye on its development and the appearance of possible competitors. In Spain we already have the experience that within a short time of an idea succeeding in other countries, we see various similar projects coming into existence.
