2022 has been an excellent year for Digital East Fund (ex-Earlybird). A year of good news, with successful exits, exciting portfolio developments, and promising new investments.
Payhawk, the all-in-one platform for company spend, was minted this year as the first Bulgarian unicorn. As the lead investor in Payhawk’s seed round in early 2020, we are proud to see Hristo and his team mark the largest Series B round by a CEE-born company with a $200m round (the second being UiPath, another Digital East portfolio company, also Romania’s first unicorn).
Digital East Fund (ex-Earlybird) Partner Mehmet Atici and Payhawk Co-founder & CEO Hristo Borisov
Another highlight of the year for us was the acquisition of Minit, the leading provider of process mining software, by Microsoft. Minit marks our second exit in the automation space after UiPath. Digital East has successfully exited half of the companies from the 2014 vintage fund portfolio.
Digital East has continued to invest in tech businesses born out of (or with ties to) Eastern Europe and Turkey. It was also an active year for us in terms of new investments. We have closed 6 new investments this year, in a wide range of tech verticals; across pre-seed, seed, and early stages:
- Midas is the pioneer mobile-first investing platform for emerging markets. Midas raised their $11m seed round, co-led by Spark Capital and Earlybird Digital East. You can learn more about Midas and our investment thesis here.
- Edge Delta is a leading edge observability platform to analyze data closer to the source. Digital East Fund has co-invested with Quiet Capital in their $63m round.
- We also made some pre-seed and seed stage investments this year: Pointee (SaaS/Automation), Sessions (SaaS/Productivity), Upstash (Infra SW/Developer Tools), and Goodlegal (SaaS/Legaltech)