About Us

What is Carcosa R&D?

Carcosa R&D is a time-first venture firm and operative co-founder of IT-companies with international growth ambitions. We invest time, knowledge and operational commitment instead of capital. You get a partner who works side by side with you to build strong teams, scalable products and sustainable companies.

We are not only an active partner and board member, but an operative co-founder with clear responsibility. Beyond that we have a broad network of startup founders and investors.

History

We are passionate IT-entrepreneurs since 1997. Some of us have worked together since then and we have been building businesses together since 1999. That is three decades of experience in system development, business development, processes, sales and automation.

In 2001 we founded Fareoffice with a small team. We built a complete booking and distribution system for the car rental industry, designed to optimize the distribution of prices and information for increased profitability. We grew to 25 people across development, customer support and sales. Our products reached over 15 countries. Our customers included Alamo Rent A Car, National Car Rental, Europcar and Hertz. In 2013 we exited when the company was acquired by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the world’s largest car rental company. We also co-founded Farepayment, a PCI DSS certified payment service provider for the travel industry.

Carcosa R&D was founded in 2015. Since then we have started and invested in several ventures. We co-founded Springville in 2019, building cloud-based finance automation software. We have built online broker systems, fintech solutions and habit-tracking tools. Two exits, several ongoing ventures and some that did not work out. Every experience is an investment in knowledge that we bring to your next venture. We bring in AI where it helps, building on our experience from the past few years.

Failures

We have had ventures that did not work out. We share them because we believe failures are steps toward success and that we learn as much from what we tried as from what we built.

Renter. A holiday cottage rental system similar to what Airbnb provides today. We built it before Airbnb became big. We failed at launch. We lacked grit at the time.

FoodGrid. We had several meetings in the industry about a system that connected producers with consumers to cut out middlemen. This was and is a big problem, a big system and many opportunities. We made a short attempt at collaboration with another startup to execute it, but we were not fully in sync on our ambitions and chose to end the collaboration. We chose to start Springville instead, but it remains an interesting project.

AlfredBlake. A system for digital menus and food ordering aimed at small restaurants. Our customers would not have had the IT budgets of chains like McDonald’s. We failed because the project became larger than planned and we lacked the resources to run both this and Springville at the same time. The timing was wrong.

GretaHarper. A video-chat bot to create a more personal brand. We repeated the AlfredBlake mistake: we could not pull off both this and Springville at the same time.

EddiePiper. Fail fast. We ran a survey on automating administration within the event industry. We had many productive meetings with both large and small players. In the end we concluded that there was no problem big enough with a simple enough solution that was not already solved by others.

Rekryterarna. We succeeded at fail fast. There was no strong interest in the market. After corona, everyone wanted people in the office. Our idea was to offer remote consultants for long-term engagements to feel like employees, but with consultant contracts so companies would not fear getting stuck in long employments. The market was not ready.

Our Portfolio

Carcosa is a venture platform: we launch our own products and collaborate to build new subsidiaries with international growth potential. Our portfolio includes exits, ongoing companies and own product initiatives.

Focus industries: HealthTech, EdTech and Fintech, with success from Traveltech. Our various teams have vast experience from building business in 15 different countries.

Products we operate: RiteLoop (habit and rite tracking) and Springville (pension and financial solutions).

How We Work

At the heart of each company we are involved in is a diversified, skilled, focused and committed team. All companies have solid vision and mission, and a great amount of persistence. We only invest in companies with a strong, diversified and tight co-founder team. A team that understands that success will take both time and effort.

Based on our own startup journeys of building global and successful IT-companies, we seek entrepreneurs who do not fear hard work and long-term investment in ideas.

Who We Work With

Entrepreneur with a problem worth solving? Investor seeking operational partners? We work with both. If you are driven and want to build something from the ground up, Carcosa is the right place for you.