ParkBee raises €1.8M from InnovationQuarter and angels
Wouter de Bruijne pitched ParkBee at Ecosummit Amsterdam on 7 July 2016 and explained why sharing commercial parking assets is a smart green business idea. Today, Wouter and the Co-founders Jian Jiang and Tom Buchmann celebrate having raised €1.8M from InnovationQuarter, the regional development agency for West Holland, and 4 undisclosed angel investors. The Dutch startup makes unused private parking garages, mainly office building car parks, available to the public. This makes sense as cars are parking most of the time and everybody knows how difficult it is to find parking in crowded city centres, especially when you are in a hurry to your next business meeting or running multiple private errands on a busy day. ParkBee is integrated in the Dutch parking apps Parkmobile, which is majority owned by BMW since 2015, and Park-line rather than trying to build their own consumer brand.
Read moreEcosummit rocks Amsterdam on 7 July 2016 at Rockstart
This year we bring Ecosummit for the first time to Amsterdam because we like the city and believe it is a good business idea. During the last few months we worked very hard to make it happen and digged deep into the Dutch smart green innovation community. We got a lot of positive response from old and new Ecosummit friends and also sent a few one-way emails into the local internet whose inbox owners don’t value our European startup platform as much as we do – not yet. This is going to change next week when Ecosummit rocks Amsterdam on 7 July at Rockstart, the famous Dutch startup accelerator founded in 2011 by the serial entrepreneur and Yoga enthusiast Oscar Kneppers and a few of his business buddies. Since 2014, Rockstart is an Ecosummit partner that showcases their smart energy portfolio every year on stage and Ecosummit TV. In March 2016, the lottery-funded impact VC DOEN Foundation invested in Rockstart because both organisations share the same vision that entrepreneurs are able to solve the big problems of our planet, society and economy.
Read moreSkeleton Technologies, Solarkiosk and Grundgrün win ECO15 London Award
Ecosummit London 2015 was our third conference at the Crystal and it turned out to be our best conference so far in the smart green capital. 160 happy and relaxed participants came together on 6-7 October 2015 to enjoy 46 startup pitches from all over Europe and celebrate smart green innovation. Our panel about fostering the cooperation between impact investors and VCs to tap into new sources of capital for smart green startups received a lot of applause – as did the panels about early stage, late stage and corporate venturing. To further grow next year we are moving Ecosummit London 2016 to CodeNode in the heart of Tech City and concentrate the action on 11 October 2016. Moreover, we announced Ecosummit Berlin 2016 on 26-27 April 2016 at the Radialsystem and Ecosummit Amsterdam 2016 on 7 July 2016 at Rockstart. During our high-speed ECO15 London Award ceremony on 6 October 2015 we announced the 3 winners Skeleton Technologies, Solarkiosk and Grundgrün.
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