Estonian Inner Circle and Sportlyzer Close Seed Rounds

    Estonian sports software startup Sportlyzer and social network startup Inner Circle have closed seed rounds. The common investor in both is Estonian Development Fund. Sportlyzer also received private angel backing from Rein Lemberpuu, ex-CEO of online gambling value added service provider Playtech Estonia, and Inner Circle’s investors included in addition Estonian private-sector firms Regio and Live Nature Eesti.

    The total investment in the two companies by Estonian Development Fund reaches 3 million EEK, or about 192,000 EUR. It seems the private investors have likely put in a matching amount, as Estonian blog Test Market reported that Inner Circle alone got around 200k EUR.

    Sportlyzer develops a social web application for tracking workouts of amateur athletes and providing them automatic consulting advice for improving their performance. While many sports trackers only provide data and statistics, Sportlyzer aims to turn the data into actionable advice. The company explains that there is a huge amount of amateur athletes and fitness exercisers who don’t get any workout management instruction. To cater this market, Sportlyzer has developed unique algorithms in cooperation with scientists from two Estonian universities to analyze and advise trainings and provide motivational support for the users.

    Sportlyzer’s service also involves a social element for sharing training experience with friends. The company’s aim is to become the leading online artificial intelligence fitness coach in the world. The service is now in private Beta. The team behind Sportlyzer include Tõnis Saag, founder of Sports Medicine Centre Vomax, and Jüri Kaljundi, one of the founders of big job board directory CV Online and Estonian photo community service Nagi. The first target markets for the firm are the UK and the USA.

    Inner Circle has just launched their service Posterbee in private Beta. Posterbee is a web service, or a social network, for communicating in groups like clubs, associations, small businesses, and families to share information and plan events privately. Inner Circle’s pitch is that 95 percent of all the communication currently takes place in these kinds of smaller groups, and open social networks like Facebook are not really the best communication tools with all the additional “information noise” and uncategorized and public social graph. Test Market has just reviewed the private beta version.

    Inner Circle’s founders include serial entrepreneur, and co-founder of Martinson Trigon Venture Partners, Allan Martinson as Chairman, while the team is led by CEO Andrus Raudsalu, ex-CEO of major Baltic web portal Delfi. The firm also aims for the international markets from the beginning.