What Is Krakow Technology Park?
Krakow Technology Park aims to support startups which are renting offices in their building by providing low-cost office space, because they offer public support. This allows startups to pay only 10% of market rates prices during their first year of being in the building and during the second year it is 25% and the third year it is 40%. After three years, a company has to leave the incubator and rent an office in normal conditions in the non-incubatior space or find an office elsewhere.
A second instrument is the complementary ecosystem of companies and institutions based in Krakow Technology Park. They not only have startups, but also larger companies or branches of international startups or corporations, which are renting offices in their non-incubation space. For example Revolut, one of the largest fin-tech startup from the UK. In addition, they have three investment funds, including Satus, which is one of the largest investment groups in Poland.
The Beginning
Krakow Technology Park was established in 1997 by the Polish government as a special economic zone. This is an area where large companies and international corporations could build their offices and factories, usually for greenfield investments. Krakow Technology Park has changed throughout the years along with the Polish economy. It was no longer enough to build factories and be a cheap East-Central manufacturer. They needed to start developing their own R&D companies.
During this transformation, their incubator for startups was born. The first building at Krakow Technology Park was built in 2008, but it was only enough for a few years. Krakow Technology Park soon started to construct the new building which is much larger and more suitable for fast developing companies. In the new building – the official rental space is around 11 000 square meters, with approximately 50 offices, two large conferences rooms, a showroom with a special exhibition zone and small conference room, a multimedia laboratory and a data center. The new building began to take its first tenants in early 2016 and had full occupancy in less than 4 months.
Ecosystem In The Building
One of their advantages is having a modern building with well-developed conference rooms, which are mostly used to organize events about technology and entrepreneurship. In the past, they have organized events such as Startup Weekend, Startup Sauna, MakeThings, Game Academy, KrakJam. In addition, there are numerous other initiatives in Kraków which are using their space to organize their meetups and conferences, like Django Girls, AI Meetup, Duckie Deck Academy and Smogathon which is a global competitions for smog-fighting innovations.
They also have on a Living Lab, where companies can try out new B2C software and hardware. A final program is their accelerator – KPT ScaleUp. Here they are accelerating startups and matching them with large companies.
Offers For The #OMGKRK Community
Rent An Office
Our co-working offer is addressed at companies that are making their first steps in the world of business and don’t need an office for the start, as they can well do with just a desk.
Consulting and support
The radically practical dimension of the workshops, carefully selected instructors, and symbolic cost are there to support you and your team.
Looking for the investor
The team of the Krakow Technology Park’s KPT Seed Fund have gathered vast experience in the years of its operation, and have decided to use it also for other initiatives that serve introduction of innovative solutions to the market.
Achievements
With all these instruments in their ecosystem, they have a few companies which have become their stars. One of them is Seedia, a producer of solar benches, which gather solar energy that then allow for charging of mobile devices. The company started renting an office at the end of 2015 as an entirely different company with industrial design services. However, in 2016 it pivoted into a hardware producer. The company rents an office on public help rules, but they also use the Living Lab service, where they checked how potential users will deal with their of product. Seedia has also joined the first batch in their acceleration program and is one of the most successful participants. They are cooperating with Cracow Airport, one of KPT partners in the accelerator, which implements their solar benches into airport infrastructure. One of the most recent successes of Seedia is raising a new fund of 800k euro for new products and foreign expansion.
