As Novac/Tena Sarcevic writes on the 21st of October, 2019, she isn't even 33 years old, and in just two years, Dragana Lipovac from Zagreb, has managed to get a company on its feet that has attracted around 300,000 euros in investments. Her startup, Hubbig, has succeeded in what she sees as the main point of such companies - "to shake off the established postulates of certain industries."

The industry where Dragana works is the freight forwarding company. She joined the industry at the age of nineteen and gained eleven years of experience in two companies. She realised that there was room for progress and the simplification of complicated procedures in that business, so she came up with the idea of ​​an application (app) that would solve such boring and bureaucratic hassles. She designed Hubbig and reported it to Startup Factory Zagreb, a startup accelerator program run by Zicer, marking just one of many steps taken by the company to date.

''I didn't think Hubbig would become so successful. I had absolutely no expectationsm'' says the founder of the Zagreb-based company, which today, at least judging by the investments it has managed to attract, has an extremely promising future.

Hubbig is actually a web platform that allows small freight forwarders, and larger ones too, to advertise their transportation services. Hubbig then connects carriers with an importer or exporter seeking a service.

''Let's say that a person works in the procurement of a retail chain and his boss tells him to find a transport truck going from Warsaw to Zagreb. Instead of calling several carriers, a person can simply go to Hubbig, enter what he wants to carry, how heavy his cargo is and from which destination he wants to transport it. When the app determines what is needed, Hubbig eliminates the carriers that aren't able to carry the cargo. Along with the carriers, the price they are looking for is automatically calculated,'' Dragana explained.

Otherwise, in a situation like this, several carriers should be called or contacted first, which will take time. This is precisely the area in which Hubbig is solving problems: the app rolls out complete offers, and the user seeking information immediately gets all the information and the specs about potential shipping.

When the user and the carrier connect via Hubbig, the transport is monitored from the moment the goods are picked up until they are delivered.

''The customers are not so alone, we have customer care, we provide all the necessary information and at any time you can send an email or call and ask about whatever you're interested in,'' said Dragana, explaining that the way her company profits from such a business model is very simple: they get a certain commission for every transport carried out.

The users are mostly from Croatia. - People import things. There are electronic components, toys, granites, textiles, furniture... There are various wholesale companies, but also smaller companies that are similar to those in Croatia in the way they function.

As was said before, the impressive Hubbig project, born in Zagreb, has received a lot of attention already at Startup Factory Zagreb, which was the first competition she applied to. She received media attention and came out as one of the winners, that is, her project was one of those that received financial support. At that time, the company was not yet open. In the same period, she entered the Zagreb Connect competition, where she won second place (which also involved a cash prize) and received a certain amount from the CES.

''Overall, this amounted to around 200,000 kuna, which was a great incentive for me to start my own business. That's what I did, and then I started building the platform,'' she stated as she recalls the period of two years ago.

For a person who was just starting out in entrepreneurship, she said, it seemed like a massive sum of money, but she invested all that money in the first five or six months of work alone.

''Of course, we had revenue, so it wasn't too chaotic, but there was still a lot to be invested in development, mostly in the IT dimension of the project. I started looking for extra investments, which I actually got extremely quickly, within three or four months, only to wait longer for it to be done. We got the money from the investments in about a year,'' she explained.

She was helped by her longtime friend Monika Mikac, who is now the co-owner of the company.

''We agreed that I'd give her a share in the company in return for giving me a lot of advice and attracting two investors. Admittedly, it's wrong to say that she attracted investors, they were attracted by the idea and the traffic Hubbig generated in 2018. There were, of course, negotiations with investors, which lasted several months, and due diligence took place. But relatively quickly, we agreed on everything. These are people who invest a lot in startups and aren't worried about their money, and on the other hand, they trust in everyone they invest in,'' said Dragana about Frank Kanayet Yepes, a Colombian who was the first investor in Rimac Automobili, and Ivan Glavaš, who is the founder of blockchain startup Forebit.

''We raised money there, which helped us greatly in our development. In the meantime, we also received a 200,000 kuna loan from Zicer and around 1.3 million kuna from EU funds. In a month, we will be celebrating two years of Hubbig's existence, and I calculated that we raised 300,000 euros in total. We're small, but we've received awards because it is assumed that we will soon become big. We could become competitors to big players. We have the technology that will allow us to do that,'' the Zagreb entrepreneur says.

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As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 12th of June, 2019, the very first investor in Croatia's highly respected Rimac Automobili, Colombian Frank Kanayet Yepes, has made yet another investment in a Croatian startup. He has put a million kuna into the innovative Zagreb company Hubbig.

Much like Rimac Automobili, this startup investment significantly deviates from what you'd typically see in Croatia, or what you could likely refer to as the Croatian average. Kanayet Yepes has registered his co-ownership in the Court Registry, where the name of his company from Bogota, Colombia, now sits. This means that his investments, therefore, weren't run through any headquarters based abroad, but Hubbig received its directly, right here in Croatia. In in this investment round, this Colombian investor was accompanied by a Croatian investor, Ivan Glavaš, who was also entered as a co-owner of Croatia's Hubbig in the Court Registry.

Glavaš is known to Croatia's continually growing startup community as the founder of blockchain startup Forebit, which Thompson Reuters and Bloomberg are doing in the world of the ''fiat money'' index, with analytics and other sophisticated financial services which are carried out for banks, stock exchanges, and other institutions. In addition to the above mentioned individuals, Monclac Mikac, former operations director at Rimac Automobili, who today is the director of the development of the Spanish company QEV Technologies, joined Hubbig's co-ownership. Mikac has now become Hubbig's adviser.

Hubbig was founded at the end of 2017. In May last year, it started with commercial work and today it has 10 members. Along with interesting investors and the location of the investment, it's also interesting that since the beginning of operations, it's remained profitable. FINA's records state that in 2018, Hubbig enjoyed a turnover of 724,658 kuna, with a net profit of 101,415 kuna. This platform is unique in that, unlike freight forwarders, it immediately prints out final prices, even for the most complex of trips, such as shipping vessels and trucks from China to Europe, or indeed vice versa.

Thar type of job has so far been done manually, so a final price was something that usually needed to be waited for. In addition, there is often no possibility for the shipment to be tracked, and this innovative startup from Croatia also offers this option.

Dragana Lipovac, the founder and director of Hubbig, says it aims to grow into a global logistics marketplace that connects carriers to customers without intermediaries and other ''middle men''.

"Our plan is to expand into the region of Central Europe, because we're currently focusing on Croatia and Zagreb and opening up opportunities for transportation in Latin America and China," stated Lipovac. She added that the contribution of Frank Kanayet, which was then joined by that of Monika Mikac, will be enormously helpful.

She also stated that, due to his investment in Rimac Automobili, Frank comes to Croatia at least twice a year and she finally had the opportunity to meet him last September.

She says that they were able to negotiate in principle, then things became more concrere, they dealt with and resolved all of the other procedures, until the investment became apparent in black and white in the Court Register.

"Frank has invested in 28 startups in the last year alone, he has a great team around him, and we've been doing everything without any problems,'' added Lipovac. Ivan Glavaš, another investor in Hubbig, says that the core of this platform to raise price transparency in freight forwarding.

"My entire career on the stock market revolves around prices, so my work with Hubbig is even more interesting,'' said Glavaš. He is convinced that his return on this investment is safe.

However, he emphasised the fact that he has no intention of pulling out of the investment, claiming that his investment was to help grow the company. How well Hubbig's growth plans are going is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that the company has already exceeded last year's revenue.

"I believe that the revenue in 2019 will be double in comparison to that of last year, and the plans are for the number of clients, despite it still being small base, to triple," said Lipovac.

Prior to this million-kuna investment, this unusual company from Croatia received a total of 365,000 kuna of seed capital on two occasions. At the beginning of the year, it took a convertible loan of 200,000 kuna, and at the end of 2017, it won at Zagreb Connect, winning 165,000 kuna.

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