ruum swings into action

Last week I popped along to ruum to see the new space, listen to Plural VC’s Taavet Hinrikus field questions from the new summer cohort, and catch up with the organisers to see how it’s all coming together in the Krulli hacker space. 

ruum’s summer residency drew a huge amount of Estonia’s next top talent (hopefuls) out from behind their screens and into the Krulli Quarter building to gather, inspire, bond and build. The opportunity saw over 220 applications for a chance to snag a spot on the 6 week long experience. A lucky bunch of 60 builders made it past the threshold and are now busy moving their ideas into something substantial enough to pitch in August. 

Tim Vaino, investor manager at Practica Capital and ruum number one fan, told me how the team managed to whittle the applications down to the chosen few. Some teams got automatic promotion due to the “seniority of the people who were building the teams, and then we had an acceptance hackathon where everybody else could participate - it was natural selection by the strength of the idea and the team,” he tells me. 

One of those more mature types, in terms of startup experience of course, is Ott Ilves with his most recent startup Display.dev just raised €470,000 in pre-seed funding to grow its publishing and collaboration platform for AI agents. 

The space has now expanded to two floors and many of the companies from the first cohort are still housed in the original space including Bilt.me and Leio. 

Choose carefully

The Q&A session with Hinrikus really covered multitudes but a couple of nuggets I will share are...he said when you are looking for investment do decent reference checks on the investors. “Especially with founders from companies where things went badly, and see how investors behaved then,” he advised. 

On choosing the right co-founder he said that co‑founders are in the same category as spouses and investors, in terms of how hard they are to divorce. Spend real time together, see each other in stressful situations and understand each other's motivations before fully committing.”

I managed to grab a quick word with him as he was making his way out of the building. “I think it's amazing to see programmes like this, just giving people a push and acceleration to try to build something. We need to grow the ecosystem, and programmes like ruum are a great way of doing this. I'm very happy that I was here speaking to them, and very happy to be a supporter," he said.

A community effort

The ruum hacker space was co-founded by Liisa Jõerüüt and Helery Pops and as well as having Vaino as a number one fan, it also has Marko Klopets and Kaja Aulik. The summer residency is now two weeks into the six week stint. 

Jõerüüt tells me that even since the launch they are still getting queries about ruum. “So there are more builders and people building in the space - we for sure haven't reached all the people that we could - that's really exciting. People are building in Estonia, I think that's the coolest thing,” she said. 

“It's a community effort,” she tells me, “and we have such great partners around us. Skaala, our main backers, and [also we have] Swedbank, Trind Ventures, 2°C Ventures, Specialist VC and people pitching in of their own free time,” she adds, explaining that it’s still all done on a voluntary basis. 

“We enable the playground, and it's up to you to utilise the playground,” says Vaino before he heads out the door, only to return later with his freshly groomed, very enthusiastic dog. 

ruum is in full swing. Dogs are welcome!