10 Hungary-based startups to watch out for in 2020

Hungary has been a vibrant startup hub ever since Prezi came onto the scene. It was the country’s first Unicorn, and nowadays, Hungary is on the rise and its capital, Budapest has very high appeal to tech entrepreneurs. Here’s a list of Hungary based startups to watch out for in 2020 compiled by EU-Startups.

BARION PAYMENT

Established in 2015, Barion Payment, based in Budapest, is an electronic payment service comprised of Barion Gateway and Wallet. The Getaway enables merchants to accept card payments online for 1% or less, while the Wallet allows users to pay in more than 6000 online shops and also use the app as a prepaid wallet for wire transfers. The company serves more than 5000 merchants and millions of users in 5 countries and has risen more than €6 million investment from HomeCredit.

BOOKR KIDS

Founded by Dorka Horváth and Dani Karányi in 2015 this Budapest-based edtech was created with the aim to develop intelligent, constructive digital content for children and make reading a natural part of children’s lives.  Four years later, Bookr is the leading digital publishing company of interactive books in Central Europe and is known to provide over 250 classic and modern interactive books, tales and poems that are a unique mix of digital books and skill-developing games.

CONVERSIFIC

Founded in 2016 as a Business Intelligence platform Conversific was aimed to capture and analyse the data from online stores, as a result of the rapidly changing retail landscape. Functioning as an analytics tool, Conversific helps brands and retailers help optimise traffic and conversion, gather better data and grow online sales. Financially backed by Hiventures Investment Fund in 2018 and 2019, the startup has been receiving the attention it deserves, and in 2018, they reached more than 5000 e-commerce stores.

FAMILY FINANCES

Family Finances is a fintech startup offering design-driven mobile banking solutions for financial institutions with a special focus on younger generations. They currently have four products: RocketMoney, an allowance manager that enables parents and children to send, save and spend money on a shared platform; Edutainment, elevating financial consciousness for teenagers in a gamified way; Drops,  a chat-based P2P money transfer solution; and SpendInvest, a hassle-free investment experience for millennials. Intesa Sanpaolo is already enhancing their digital value offering for young customers with Family Finances. The startup closed a seed financing round in February 2019.

HEAT VENTORS

HeatVentors was launched in 2017 as a thermal energy storage tank based on phase change material technology called HeatTANK. It was originally a university research project. The novel tank can save between 20 – 40%o f energy, store heat energy between 100 and 600 degrees Celsius, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by half, all that with an average ROI of 3-4 years. More importantly, compared to the water storage HeatTank is 90% smaller in size, making it perfect for both family and industrial use. The startup closed a seed round in 2018, and received H2020 funding in 2019, to boost its operations.