TBILISI, APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia is attracting globally footloose tech start-ups because of its relatively low taxes, skilled workforce and low salaries.
One of these is Topishare, now headquartered in one of Tbilisi’s oldest districts.
The grapevines dangling above doorways, the narrow streets and 19th century architecture are all in stark contrast to Topishare’s eight- person tech team who spend their days working on building what they hope will be a cutting-edge social media network focused on giving users increased privacy and greater control over what they read.
Israelis Rotem and Hila Peled, daughter and mother, co-founded Topishare.
“We have worked from Costa Rica, to Panama and Bulgaria, but Georgia stood out to us,” Ms Peled said.
“It’s not perfect, but the relatively easy business registration, easy visas, and low developers’ salaries convinced us.”
And Topishare is just part of a trend of tech start-ups moving to the Georgian capital. The angel.co website, which monitors start-up activities, said 42 were now based in Tbilisi.
Caroline Sutcliffe, an American, set up Chaikhana, an online media training platform and publishing tool focused on the South Caucasus, in Tbilisi two years ago.
She currently employs 12 people and said that although there have been problems, such as being turfed out of an office suddenly when it was sold overnight by the owner, there are plenty of positives.
“It is cheap to open a business, easy to open a bank account, there are few strings attached, labour is cheap, and rent is cheap,” she said.
There are problems with being based in Georgia, though, Eric Barret, another American who set up Jump- start, a platform which shares open- source technologies, said. He said that Tbilisi was a pleasant place to live but poor infrastructure was a problem.
“As a tech organization, we need to rely on predictable Internet service,” he said referring to the number of unscheduled outages that hit the Georgian internet network.
“Often my entire staff has to take a trip to a cafe that has Internet so we can continue to work.”
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(News report from Issue No. 276, published on April 15 2016)
