Polish startup Photon Entertainment, has just been awarded the title of best startup in Europe.

Photon is a robot that helps children take their first steps in the world of programming.

The startup are now looking to expand and to take their products further overseas.



Polish startup Photon Entertainment, has just been given the title of best startup in Central and Eastern Europe by the European Business Angels Network (EBAN) at the EBAN Annual Congress.

Photon, innovated by four students and a lecturer from Białystok University of Technology, is a robot that helps children take their first steps in the world of programming and new technologies. Equipped with sensors that allow it to see, hear and touch, it can even distinguish darkness from light and measure distance.

Through using an application, children can learn the basics of programming and then go on to teach Photon how to use them, unlocking the robot's functionality step by step.

The robot went on sale in 2017, exactly eight months ago. Up until recently, it was only available in Poland, Sweden, Singapore, and Australia — however i ts creators are now preparing to enter other markets such as Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In Poland, Photon will set you back $213. As of November 2017, it was also available in stores authorised as sellers of Apple products and, so far, the company has managed to sell 5,000 copies of the robot.

Marcin Joka, one of the robot's innovators, said: "We're still only at the beginning of sales, which is promising. At the moment we are going based on our own forecasts. It's difficult to assess and to make predictions because there are no figures for previous quarters: we started in the fourth quarter of 2017 and don't have a full sales year yet."

"While sales are already stable, we're doing everything to boost these results — hopefully tenfold," he added.

Photon is branching out overseas

Soon, Białystok will be looking to win another round of investment for international expansion.

"We've started talks about foreign funds, investors — and EBAN's award will also help us," said Joka.

"We're planning a lot of new extensions, add-ons and accessories for the current product and have several new potential products we want to surprise the world with, but they're still in the development phase. As for expansion, we have ambitious plans: we're looking to enter the Scandinavian, French and German-speaking markets in the coming quarters and next on the list, we have Eastern Europe, the US, Arab countries and Africa," said Joka, "and by 2020, we plan to be on 30 markets — we firmly believe we can achieve that."