Estonian startup Guaana OÜ, whose mission was to bring scientists, experts and money together, has recently filed for bankruptcy, writes “Postimees“.

“After seven years of operation, we have to admit that we are a little ahead of our time, and it is very difficult for a small start-up to change the market for science financing”, – said Edgar Aronov, co-founder and board member of Guana. During its existence, the company has attracted investments of almost € 1 million.

“Scientific collaboration and research funding processes are strictly old habits. While this trend is moving towards more innovative processes, it will take longer to reach the turning point”, – he explained.

In the meantime, they were pretty close to a breakout, according to the company. He believes the most successful project is the Dubai Future Foundation, which has donated half a million dollars to fund research in Guan. “Although this process usually takes 6-12 months, we were able to complete it in one month with the participation of many leading universities in the world”, – said Aronov.

“We see that this market is moving in the right direction and growing, but for us it was too big a piece that we bit off too early”, – he explained. “In this regard, we, as shareholders, amicably decided to move forward”.

In 2016, Guaana promised to donate a tenth of a stake in the company to 100,000 scientists who use their platform. A year later, the company had to admit that they had not collected a critical number of researchers, so the share remained unallocated, wrote Äripäev at one time.

Aronov himself, along with the co-founders of Guaana, including one of the founders of Pipedrive Martin Henk, began to run the new company Eventornado, which is a tool for organizing hackathons and online competitions. “We saw that there was no solution on the market that would help organize global challenges”, – said Aronov.

Guaana OÜ has developed a web technology that helps scientists to find the necessary funding for new research projects and collaboration partners among experts. To better understand the needs of researchers and funders, Guaana has created a fast and transparent grant allocation model based on a peer review system.

In the Guaana environment, almost anyone could pose some kind of scientific problem and use the “intellectual capabilities of the community” and the knowledge of the entire user community to solve it.

Finnish tech blog Arctic Startup, which tracks startups in the Nordic and Baltic countries, wrote in early 2016 that Guaana is worth looking at as a potential startup in the near future.

According to Krediidiinfo, Guaana’s tax arrears amount to almost € 30,000.

At the end of last year, the company employed six people. Edgar Aronov is a member of the Management Board, in addition to him, the owners include the Finnish company Arteel Ventures, as well as Martin Tajur, Martin Henk and Marko Russiver.

Source: hubs.ua