Startup From Riga To Revolutionise Alumni Relations
Riga, March 12, 2014.
Asteria Education, a startup that aims to help the world's best universities engage more alumni, has
received 50 000 EUR pre-seed loan from Imprimatur Capital Seed Fund, a venture fund focusing on highgrowth technology companies. In a billion EUR industry dominated by outdated systems, Asteria seeks to
bring in a new, user-centered approach to alumni relations. The product alumniplus.co is a cloud based
university branded platform that helps keep alumni contacts up to date and acts as a central focus point
for alumni engagement.
Asteria Education (AE), the team behind alumniplus.co, is a multidisciplinary team of business managers,
advertisers, creatives, researchers and designers, all with the aim of making things they would love to use
themselves. They were brought together by a fundraising campaign set out to beat Stanford University by
tripling the alumni giving rates of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. Following that very
successful result they have been aiming high ever since. AE already is working with universities in
Sweden, Germany, UK and Latvia.
"We see that the traditional approach to communicating with alumni is “push”. Pushing more news to
alumni, asking to update profile information, asking to donate. Our approach is the opposite – “pull”. We
believe in giving alumni what they want the way they will enjoy it and as a result seeing the community
become more engaged than ever. We created A+ to make the communication between universities and
alumni much more relevant and human. This will lead to strengthened alumni networks and tangible value
created for the university." says Raimonds Kulbergs, Managing Director of AE.
Toby Moore, Managing Partner of Imprimatur Capital Fund Management, stated “We were impressed by
the early success of Asteria and are happy to support their initial international expansion.”
Imprimatur Capital is an international seed investor in high-growth technology businesses with global
market potential. To date Imprimatur Capital Fund Management, headquartered in Riga, Latvia, has
invested in more than 20 start-ups sourced from the Baltic, Nordic, Russia region, in sectors including
nano-technology, green technology, electronics and enterprise software. Imprimatur Capital Seed Fund is
financed by the Latvian Guarantee Agency (LGA) which is a Latvian specialised development finance
institution active in all segments of the financial market, investing in VC funds, providing mezzanine loans
and loan, leasing and export guarantees.
Asteria Education is one of the startups based in TechHub Riga, which is the center of start-up and
technology events in Latvia. TechHub Riga is a non-profit organization founded to help create a growthenhancing environment for successful new technology and innovation based companies.
“From my experience in the USA and Europe I see that universities would benefit greatly from the
innovation that alumniplus.co brings to fundraising. I am happy to see Asteria punching above their
weight to create new solutions for alumni engagement.” Andris Berzins, TechHub Riga co-founder.
Contacts:
Raimonds Kulbergs, Asteria Education, Managing Director and co-founder, mob. +371 29477191,
raimonds@asteriaedu.com
Toby Moore, Managing Partner, Imprimatur Capital Fund Management, tel. +371 67 365 275;
tm@impcap.com, www.icfm.lv
Andris Berzins, TechHub, andris.berzins@techhub.com