Krizevci Company Speck's Projects Increasing in Price on US Market
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sergej Novosel Vuckovic writes on the 25th of November, 2020, in just a few years of its existence, the Speck agency from Krizevci has risen from a ‘speck’ to a Croatian IT sector star.
Speck's rapid upward trends were recently verified by the powerful consulting company Deloitte in the tender of Fast50, the fastest growing technology company in Central Europe, as the company grew by an incredible 1076% in a year.
Speck took third place in the Rising Stars category, a company under four years old but with growth potential. The team led by the 30-year-old graduate electrical engineer Tenodi (Speck's co-founder is Luka Radicek), justifies this potential by implementing projects of design and development of software and mobile and web platforms year after year. Here in Croatia, they are a partner of Combis on cloud applications, their edtech (for e-learning) project is autoskola.hr, and here they are currently working for 24sata, the KTC shopping centre, a young startup with a machine learning project and the Krizevci Instruction Centre.
''In just under a year, Speck has grown empirically and numerically with 20 employees on a team of more than 40 experts involved in building global edtech, fintech and martech platforms such as Petersons, Minka and Covideo. In addition to new collaborations, we've entered into an important partnership with a private acquisition fund from the United States, Triangle Digital Ventures (TDV), which has opened the path for new projects and expansion in the US market,'' says Tenodi. Speck's partnership with Triangle Digital Ventures, a private investment fund from America, happened, he added, spontaneously, through work on one of Speck’s projects.
''Covideo is a SaaS video marketing company with which we've been cooperating for a little over two years now, and in May this year it acquired TDV. Speck was a design and development partner on the project, we had the opportunity to work with the founders of TDV, who soon gave us the opportunity to work on more projects from their portfolio,'' says Tenodi. Apart from the quality of the work so far, these projects were, conditionally speaking, more accessible to Speck thanks to the fact that from the end of 2019 it has has an office in Indianapolis, his third after the ones located in Krizevci and here in Zagreb. There is now one employee there because of the pandemic working from home. It was the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic that accelerated Speck's growth as an agency, Tenodi added.
"The crisis has further strengthened our relationships with our clients. It is precisely such partnerships, in which agility and understanding of the needs of each specific client dominate, and that's the key to reacting quickly to market changes. The biggest challenge the pandemic brought us was on the KidzToPros (KTP) project, for a client in California. A key aspect of their business was the provision of extracurricular activities in an offline format for more than 250 schools, and their work during the pandemic was completely stopped. In less than three months, with the KTP team, we've developed five new digital products through which they have expanded and digitalised their business,'' explained Speck's boss. Speck's references also include work for clients in Germany and France, and a project for a Colombian fintech named Minka is now underway.
"Minka has teamed up with us to develop an open, flexible and highly scalable financial services infrastructure that companies wishing to provide services such as money transfers and e-wallets can use instead of developing their own infrastructure," they explained from Speck.
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Blossoming Croatian IT Sector Continues to Make Global Waves
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Lucija Spiljak writes on the 22nd of November, 2020, the Croatian IT sector is continuing to achieve great levels of success and recognition, which has been confirmed by the 21st edition of Deloitte's list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in Central Europe, in which, in addition to companies from 18 countries, Croatia also participated.
Electrocoin, whose main activity is intermediation in cryptocurrency trading and processing, took 6th place in the category of the 50 fastest growing companies in Central Europe with impressive growth of 2617%. Nikola Skoric, a nuclear engineer, founded the company back in 2014, one year after Croatia's EU accession, and was soon joined by Marin Marzic, a computer security expert. It all started as a mere hobby, but Skoric and Marzic ended up creating the fastest growing Croatian fintech startup, little did they know at the time.
"It turned out that we were able to innovate and make a profit, grow at warp speed, push crypto into the mainstream and start a revolution in the payment industry," said Skoric. Electrocoin's bitcoin-mjenjacnica.hr is the first and most popular online exchange office in all of Croatia. In cooperation with Croatian Post (Hrvatska posta), the Crypto Centre was opened last year, which enables the sale of cryptocurrencies across 50 Croatian post offices, and in May, Sveta Nedelja was among the first cities to start the process of accepting cryptocurrencies, pushing the growing Croatian IT sector even further forward.
In 36th place on the list comes the consumer platform for online shopping, Bazzar.hr. with excellent growth of 695%. It is the Croatian counterpart of Amazon, founded by brother and sister Viktor and Tana Zimmermann.
"The biggest challenge was to change the perception of people in Croatia when it comes to online shopping, as well as to position themselves out there on the e-commerce market. Despite everything, we've been recording 100% growth from year to year since the very beginning. We're proud that Deloitte has included us on this prestigious list for the second time, which is another confirmation of the decency of our business model,'' the owner stated. This year, they've recorded more than 250,000 users, while next year they will focus on growth right here on the Croatian market, with investments going to innovation and service improvement, a wider offer, better prices and a better overall user experience. "We're also planning strong expansion into the regional market," Zimmermann announced.
In 39th place is Agrivi, which grew by 640%. The company is credited with developing one of the most successful agricultural production management platforms in the whole world. With impressive growth of 549%, 44th place was taken by Include from Solin, which is engaged in the development and production of urban street equipment for smart cities and the production of solar benches. Zagreb's Eco Mobile, which specialises in ICT solutions to support waste management processes took 47th place with brilliant growth of 530%.
The rising Croatian IT sector stars of... Krizevci!
In the Rising Stars category, Speck placed third with amazing growth of 1076%. In a mere two years, this Krizevci-based IT agency has acquired clients for whom they work on web and mobile development and design services.
"After three years of working in a team consisting of more than 40 experts and creating solutions for global clients with a massive influence at Fintech, EdTech and MarTech, I'm proud to say that the teamwork is truly a dream," said director Tomislav Tenodi.
In the special category Stars of Positive Influence, which was launched only this year, three Croatian companies were presented - Rimac Automobili, Infinum and Infobip. Josip Biscan, managing partner at Infinum, says that when Infinum was founded, there weren't many who knew how to programme for mobile devices and the "boom" of the Apple Store hadn't yet happened. Then, they started hiring smart people who didn't yet have any experience, but did have a true desire to learn, and Matej Spoler, the co-founder of Infinum alongside Tomislav Car, taught them to programme for the now wildly popular iPhone - today's iOS platform.
''We've continued to employ those who love technology, want to learn and share their knowledge. We have maintained this practice to this day and that's why Infinum is continuously growing. The average annual growth over the last five years has been around 40% per year and the goal is to continue to grow sustainably, not fast or exponentially,'' says Biscan. Together with their colleagues from no less than the gigantic Porsche, they want to employ about 100 experts in the development of digital solutions for Porsche and beyond at Porsche Digital Croatia located here in Zagreb.
"The Croatian IT sector is a strong community with a lot of potential, to which the general public may only now be beginning to pay any real attention,'' he concluded.
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