The team of eTOLLs EU, a Ukrainian solution for the integrated purchase of electronic vignettes for toll roads in 8 EU countries at once, developed by the Ukrainian company Shtrafy UA, has attracted €450 thousand in investment from Imperia Holding, a leading national distributor of FMCG products in the Ukrainian market. The investment was made possible due to a strong track record within 7 months of launch and allowed us to have a real current valuation of the product of €3 million.
Negotiations with Imperia Holding took about a quarter and envisage successive steps to reach the A round over the next 6 months.
Raising investment
Hayk Tovmasyan, co-owner and CEO of Imperia Holding, said that they had been following the project team for a long time and noted that since 2016, Shtrafy UA has professionally provided a convenient and efficient service for 2.5 million drivers.
“Together with the team, we tested the hypotheses and they showed impressive results, which is why we decided to invest. We expect the team to improve the product and actively work with the business development, operations, analytics, and marketing departments to expand to new countries and develop the user experience in the product,” Tovmasyan said.
What does eTOLLs EU offer?
The eTOLLs EU solution provides up-to-the-minute information about toll roads on a driver’s route and helps to avoid paying fines. After struggling with bureaucracy and the inconvenience of receiving paper vignettes at various gas stations while traveling across Europe, the Ukrainian development team decided to digitize this process.
So, in February 2023, the team led by Denys Dmytrov launched the eTOLLs EU service for everyone traveling in the EU.
According to research on the toll road market conducted by Roland Berger, this is one of the areas that needs to be revitalized through digitalization to improve mobility between EU member states.
Digital vignettes
Shtrafy UA, a national payment service, is a pioneer in the digitalization of traffic ticketing and payment. Drawing on its own experience in developing electronic services for drivers, the team has created a new application for convenient travel and purchase of digital vignettes.
This feature is useful not only for drivers from Ukraine who have come to the EU and cannot always navigate the European rules in time, but also for EU drivers themselves. After all, the process of buying a vignette in the EU is different in each country.
Digital vignettes need to be purchased in each country on special portals. Usually, it took a driver at least a week to purchase electronic vignettes. They had to find a service provider in the destination and transit countries, find a way to pay for the vignette, and it was not always possible to do this online.
As a rule, in each country, services are provided by official services and commercial services. Checking the service also takes time, etc. As a result, drivers used to overpay because they didn’t know all the nuances of each country. The Ukrainian startup provides an opportunity to plan routes, choose the best one, and pay all the necessary road tolls in one click.
Growth in the number of users
The eTOLLs EU project currently serves 80 thousand drivers across Europe. More than 10 thousand transactions have been made in six months. Each quarter, the average number of purchases and the average check per customer are growing.
There are billions of unpaid fines in Europe. The reason for this is that government systems are too complicated and unfriendly, with user interfaces at the level of the 90s. States lose money to the budget, and drivers face blocked accounts. This is what Denys Dmytrov, co-founder of the project Fines UA and eTOLLs EU, says.
“We like to take complex systems and make them simple. We aim to digitalize processes and systems for drivers. The ideas we have come up with are to reduce the number of fines for unpaid tolls, digitize toll road payments, and reduce this process from 20 minutes to 30 seconds for the whole of Europe,” Dmitrov adds.
Service development
The company has offices in Ukraine, Germany, and the Czech Republic. A distributed team in Berlin, Prague, Lisbon, Kyiv, and other European cities is working on service development. The company plans to expand its teams in both the Czech Republic and Germany. Currently, both Ukrainians and Germans work in Berlin.
The company is also looking for large businesses with fleets to develop cooperation. eTOLLs EU can help company employees track when vignettes have expired in order to take care of the legal movement of their drivers in time. The company is also looking for a partner to launch a joint pilot project to integrate payments for trucks.
Currently, 50% of sales in eTOLLs EU are accounted for by drivers from Ukraine. This is followed by Germany – 12%, Poland – 4%, and Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Latvia – 3%.
Vignettes are available for the territories of 8 EU countries: Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Switzerland.
