ProductLead raises Euro 600.000 for development and expansion in Europe

Cristina Blanaru Business, Digital & Media, Finances, Marketing, Start Up

Romanian based ProductLead, the innovative integrated digital platform for marketing content creation receives 600.000 Euros funding for further development and expansion across European markets. The financing was coordinated by Sparking Capital, as Lead Investor, in partnership with Eleven Ventures (Bulgaria) and Founders Bridge (Sweden) investment funds.

The ProductLead mission is to democratize access to content creation at scale through social data analytics, automation, and integrations.

Mihai Bocai, CEO ProductLead:

“We are very excited by the success of this round of investment, which will allow us to speed up our growth. We put a lot of passion and effort to ensure high quality services to our clients, helping them scale their digital content quickly, ensuring high-volume, high-quality creative production with the use of technology and automation. Our business objectives focus on growth and partnerships, on-boarding customers across key industries and geographies, giving us the grip we need to strengthen our value proposition for Series A.”

The ProductLead’s target is to grow its team and gradually win foreign markets, especially CEE, DACH, and Nordics. Furthermore, ProductLead wants to strengthen a set of strategic partnerships with major players in ecommerce, marketplace, and tech marketing tools.

Vlad Panait, Managing Partner at Sparking Capital:

“This is the second round of investment we carried out for ProductLead and we are very glad that Eleven Ventures and Founders Bridge investment funds joined forces with us to contribute to the European expansion of ProductLead. Our strategy is to support and help innovative start-ups and products to scale at international level. Besides the financial investment, we contribute with expertise, mentoring, and networking to accelerate the development of the companies in which we invest”.

The technology empowers any marketeer to develop efficient creatives, 10x faster and at 1/10 of the cost by providing a powerful creatives automation engine that leverages eCommerce assets, influencer generated content and brand assets at scale. ProductLead is already a Facebook, TikTok and VTEX partner.

Hristo Hristov, Venture Partner at Eleven Ventures:

“The number one reason we invest is always the team. Mihai and Alexander are serial entrepreneurs with a heavy background in social commerce and constantly on the look to improve themselves. But apart from the obvious they are trying to solve a very big problem. Digital advertising has exploded over the last ten years and has grown to an extent where bots are bidding against other bots to capture the relevant audience. However, something that has not changed and is still done in the majority by humans are the creatives one has to put in the advertising platforms. We are very happy to be coinvesting in ProductLead together with Sparking Capital and Founders Bridge.”

Liviu Munteanu, General Partner, Founders Bridge:

“The company that Mihai and his amazing team have created is a perfect match for our vision of investing in local start-ups to help them expand internationally. Moreover, having on board three VC funds from three different countries validates our strong belief that ProductLead is a globally scalable company. This is a great moment for the Romanian start-up ecosystem as a whole, and we are confident that ProductLead is firmly on its way to a resounding Series A round in the near future.”

The legal assistance of the transaction was provided by Boanță Gîdei & Associates, Kinstellar and Dimitrova, Staykova & Partners for the Investors while ProductLead’s team was advised by BPV Grigorescu Stefanica’s team lead by Managing Partner Catalin Grigorescu.

ProductLead offers Creative as a Service in a smart, seamless, streamlined, and connected flow helping marketing teams to tackle more work at a lower cost and in less time. ProductLead’s vision is to become the leading social media marketing content creation platform by democratizing access to content creation through social data analytics, automation, and integrations.

Sparking Capital is an early stage venture capital fund based in Bucharest, Romania. Sparking Capital makes pre-seed and seed investments in innovative companies in the consumer-tech, fintech, supply-chain, property-tech, marketing-tech, digital transformation and sustainability sectors.

Eleven Ventures is one of the leading early-stage VCs in Bulgaria and in Southeast Europe, investing in start-ups since 2012. With 150 collective investments over 8 years, Eleven’s team has been instrumental in catalyzing the local start-up ecosystem. Eleven supports tech companies in four priority verticals – Fintech, Healthcare, Future of Work, Future of Food and invests primarily in B2B technology innovation.

Founders Bridge is a Swedish venture capital fund investing in forward-thinking start-ups aiming to expand globally. The fund partners combine the operational expertise, entrepreneurial mindset and financial know-how needed to build and scale businesses. As a key connector to the Nordic markets, Founders Bridge offers hands-on assistance through extended networks of experts in areas such as sales and marketing, growth, tech and legal.