Early Stage Investment Company: Support for Founding Businesses.
A very important step on the way to creating a top quality ICT location is the provision of company capital for the founding companies (start ups).
For this difficult stage for the business, there exists in Austria, and also generally speaking in Central Europe, virtually no private market. For this reason, there are several forms of public support (i.e. from state or regional sources) in Austria for those setting up companies, which have until now, however, not always worked in a way that is satisfactory or suited to needs.
As has been shown by the successful ICT model in Sweden, a mixture of public and private support is the best way of providing suitable Early Stage capital for founders.
Using the Swedish experiences as a starting point, for eSchwechat.at an Early Stage investment company was developed and founded out of private business, which, through guarantees from the municipality, keeps the character of the PPP (Public Private Partnership) model.
In the future, this Early Stage investment company will invest in Schwechat based companies within the Early Stage phase (Seed and start up/Expansion) in the field of Information and Communication Technology.
The average amount in the initial investment is around EUR 100.000.- The minimal investment is usually around EUR 20.000.-, the maximum around EUR 250.000.- After thorough expert examination of the projects, company contributions are kept in the form of real shares for around five years. After that they will be carried over to Trade Sell or, in special cases, floated on the stock market.
A further part of the project is a tailor-made incubator, based in the 
concorde technology center schwechat (concorde.tcs), within which the financed firms can expand into dynamic, profit oriented businesses through various sorts of help including advice, continuous coaching, monitoring, national and international networking.
From the company base in Schwechat, particularly the founding companies in Schwechat, Lower Austria (particularly southern Lower Austria), Vienna and the Burgenland (particularly northern Burgenland), i.e. companies from the Vienna Region as well as those from Western Hungary (the Sopron-Moson-Györ region) and Western Slovakia (the Bratislava region) and – through partnerships with technology centres – also from other countries will be contacted.