Tallinn-based koos receives €4 million in funding to accelerate a new era of ownership | eu-startups

The Tallinn-based startup KOOS has just secured €4 million in seed funding led by Plural Platform with participation from investors including LocalGlobe, Tiny.vc and Matt Clifford. KOOS was

launched in Estonia following an angel pre-seed round of €600k from an array of the high profile Estonian founders. Following Plural’s €4 million investment, KOOS now plans to launch and

build its presence in the UK and across Europe. KOOS, which means ‘together’ and ‘alongside’ in Estonian, was founded earlier this year by serial entrepreneur and former CIO of Estonia Taavi

Kotka. Created to serve organisations who are committed to giving a true stake to their contributors, the KOOS stakeholder incentivisation platform provides a brand new way of rewarding and

motivating everyone who contributes to a company’s growth and success. By leveraging KOOS’ equity-like growth programmes without giving away a single share, a company gives their community

a reason to advocate for them with fairer rewards, which are paid out only when the company meets the predefined business goal. This makes KOOS programmes ROI-positive by design for the

company running them and drives the stakeholder economy by rewarding equitably those who contributed to the corporate success. Kotka, who led the Estonian government’s world leading policies

around digital democracy and e-government for four years, explained: _“At KOOS we believe technologies can be used to help build a more equitable society. To be successful you need to

deliver great value to all your stakeholders and we have come up with a digital tool that allows businesses to engage and reward their community, widening the circle of people who have

access to equity-like incentives which in turn increases the pool of people who will advocate for the business and want it to succeed. We offer companies a new way of achieving their

business goals more efficiently, while simultaneously improving their financial and social impact performance.”_ Plural’s investment also comes with the support of founders-turned-investors

Taavet Hinrikus, former CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise) and Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of Teleport, both of which will take on active advisory roles to accelerate the roll out of the KOOS

platform. The investors join a host of other successful technology founders backing KOOS, including fellow Estonians Markus Villig, founder of Bolt, and Kaarel Kotkas, founder and CEO of

Verrif. KOOS is built with support from top legal firm Ellex in emerging tech, adopting a recognised legal framework that complies with EU and UK law. Sten Tamkivi, adviser and Plural

Platform co-founder, said: _“Plural wants to invest to help create a more equal society. We believe that broader community ownership leads to more meritocratic systems so that wealth can be

distributed based on actual contributions. KOOS has come up with a way to track the support of all stakeholders in a community or business, without having to give away equity. We anticipate

that the platform KOOS is building will become an essential building block of many startups, funds and communities including charities and NGOs.”_ Since its introduction to the market just

four months ago, 27 early adopter paying customers are running 35 programmes – which include startups, NGOs, SMEs and larger corporations. KOOS’ Saas pricing model includes an onboarding

fee, a monthly retainer, and 1% of all rewards (tokens) created by the programmes on the KOOS platform. Estonian ride-sharing company Forus Takso recently launched its business with 30%

equity allocated to KOOS tokens. For any service consumed on Forus’ platform, 1% will be given as a KOOS token to the client, 1% to the service provider and 1% to contributors.