Y Soft Ventures, a venture capital platform of Y Soft® Corporation, today announced Y Soft Ventures II, which will provide financial support and business mentoring to B2B start-ups. Y Soft Ventures II is the second investment platform raised by Y Soft Ventures since it was established in 2014 to focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) and other hardware, Industry 4.0, Smart City and Smart Office.
Y Soft Ventures II more than doubles the amount of financial support for Central European startups than the previous investment platform and is ready to invest in five to seven companies over the next few years. Together with Y Soft, external partners Zbyněk Frolík, founder of Linet;
Livesport Invest;
Soitron and its founder Ondrej Smolár; and Jiří Imrýšek are also involved in Y Soft Ventures II.
The first recipient of Y Soft Ventures II is
NenoVision, a Brno-based dynamic manufacturer of revolutionary microscopes. NenoVision develops a special type of atomic force microscope, LiteScope ™, that is easily mounted on electron microscopes. Through this connection, the advantages of both measuring technologies can be fully exploited at the same time and the analysis of samples is significantly simplified and deepened.
“NenoVision fits perfectly into our investment platform. It is a progressive hardware company that has gradually moved through the South Moravian JIC incubator, just as Y Soft did,” said Miloš Sochor, Managing Partner of Y Soft Ventures.
LiteScope ™, which won the gold medal for innovation at The International Engineering Fair, is used in research in microchips, solar cells, memory devices, microelectromechanical systems and other nanotechnologies. The main advantage of the combination of an electron microscope and the LiteScope microscope is that it is possible to assign a third dimension to the surface to be examined, thus displaying a real surface reconstruction: measure its roughness, make a depth profile and also measure the nanometer level electrical properties.
“We have known Y Soft for a long time, including its founders and their story. This was one of the main reasons we started negotiations about a possible investment in our company through Y Soft Ventures. We were looking for a reliable partner to help significantly accelerate our product to international markets. In addition to strengthening international trade and marketing, we also plan to invest in the development of our own components and new applications. We are convinced that Y Soft Ventures, in addition to the investment itself, offers us additional added value through consulting and sharing their experience in the international market, ” said Jan Neuman, founder and CEO, NenoVision.
Y Soft Ventures' strategy is to support start-ups not only by providing necessary capital support, but also by mentoring, using advanced Y Soft technologies or even using Y Soft manufacturing facilities or prototyping laboratory. Supporting these start-ups contributes to the development of a healthy business environment in the region. Y Soft is one of the main companies around which the South Moravian IoT hub is developing.
About Y Soft Ventures
Y Soft Ventures is a venture capital arm established by Y Soft Corporation, a.s. in 2014 to provide start-ups in Central and Eastern Europe with the necessary capital, resources and expertise to fast track their access to global markets. The Y Soft Ventures investment platform helps accelerate the growth of other innovative companies, especially IoT and hardware solutions for the B2B market.
About NenoVision
NenoVision was founded to develop, manufacture and market scientific measurement equipment in 2015. It is a spin-off of BUT and the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) in the Czech Republic.
The company is based in Brno, a university city with a long and proud tradition in the development of scientific instruments. Brno is also known as the "Mecca of Electron Microscopy" because it has historically been involved in the development and production of electron microscopes.
The founders, Jan Neuman, Ph.D., Zdeněk Nováček, Ph.D. and Michal Pavera, Ph.D., have more than 10 years of experience in developing atomic force microscopes for a wide range of applications under different conditions. In 2016, NenoVision launched the LiteScope, an atomic force microscope designed to expand electron microscopes. NenoVision builds on a well-established tradition in the industry and brings innovative Correlative Probe and Electron Microscopy (CPEM) to the market, characterized by at least two techniques at the same time.