October 25 marked the first ever Seedcamp event in Hungary, Seedcamp Budapest. In association with the European Entrepreneurship Foundation (EEF) Seedcamp brought 70 of their mentors together to meet 20 of Europe’s top startups. The organisers had a very difficult task selecting only the twenty most promising ideas from the hundreds of applications they received to attend the event. Out of the selected teams five were from Hungary, presenting on home turf, the others represented ten different countries from all over Europe.
The event kicked off with a brief introductory by Philipp Moehring, Principal of Seedcamp, and was followed by the pitches of the participating teams. Please meet the twenty startups that had the chance to present at the event:
- 20lin.es, from Treviso, Italy – A highly interactive collaborative writing platform that combines writing into a social experience.
- Algernon, from Budapest, Hungary – Recognizes people's emotional and psychological characteristics based on their cursor movements.
- BarBuddy, from London, UK – Simple, Effective and Portable Bar Management Software in The Cloud.
- Clubicity, from Bucharest, Romania – Online tool for building and running loyalty programs.
- Easyling, from Budapest, Hungary – Provides 1-click website translation service with thousands of native speaking translators.
- EduKoala, from Poznan, Poland – is Zynga for Education, they are changing how next generations are learning at school.
- Futurelytics, from Ostrava, Czech Republic – Helps companies to gain more value from customers by using predictive analytics.
- Gameleon, from Bucharest, Romania – The platform to create and publish multi-platform games and monetize content.
- HDRA, Budapest, Hungary – Organizes medical and scientific data to support research and personalized treatments.
- Inventarium, from Moscow, Russia – A customer development tool for mobile companies.
- Ma este Színház!, from Budapest, Hungary - Theatre Tonight offers last minute theatre and concert tickets: last day, half price.
- MailMill, from Budapest, Hungary – A new email experience. MailMill will categorize, contextualize and color the contents of your non-personal email.
- MyFoodTrader.com, from Shropshire, UK – B2B trading website for the food industry. Enabling businesses to trading in products and ingredients.
- QR Promo, from Rijeka, Croatia – Simple, innovative, easy to use, mobile loyalty reward software.
- Railsonfire, from Vienna, Austria – Hosted continuous integration and deployment platform for mobile and web applications.
- Save The Mom, from Brescia, Italy – A web and mobile service that simplifies communications among family members.
- Seedbit, from Cluj Napoca, Romania – Makes the perfect match between awesome events and the best sponsors.
- Twingz, from Sulz, Austria – Makes thingz smarter. Users and thingz communicate in written and spoken language.
- UseTogether, from Cluj-Napoca, Romania – Imagine eBay for sharing. Add an awesome community built around that and you’ve got us.
- VetCloud, from Nis, Serbia – Animal healthcare platform for veterinarians entering a huge untapped global market.
The pitches were followed by a Masterclass lecture given by Klaus Hommels, a European Venture Capitalist who has been involved in numerous successful internet investments including QXL/Tradus, Skype, Facebook, King.com, StarDoll, Xing and Spotify. The lecture compared the startup ecosystems of the China, Europe, and the US. He also talked about and highlighted the three most important aspects of establishing successful ecosystems: center of identity, acceleration of scale, and financing environment. The lecture was finished off by an extensive Q&A session, where the audience had the chance ask about related topics.
The second part of the event consisted of a five hour long mentoring session, where the teams were given advice by all the Mentors of Seedcamp. The teams also had the chance to select one mentor of their choice to have an in-depth discussion with. After nine hours of presenting, mentoring and networking, the teams and the mentors took off to the KoWerk Office, where EEF's monthly E Liquidity event concluded the day.
Also, by the end of the day the Mentors selected eight teams for private feedback sessions on the following day.
The Winners
The quality of the 20 selected teams was at an extremely high level, the judges selected 2 new teams to join the Seedcamp programme:
- Futurelytics - Futurelytics is working on a solutions that allow companies to target their existing customer base more effectively. The choiche fell on Futurelytics because the team has a clear vision of the market, combined with an easy to use product that identifies the customer’s pain head on.
- Stealth - Seedcamp also invested in a second company out of Seedcamp Budapest. As the team is still working hard on their product, they prefer not to be mentioned by name at this time.
