EIT ICT Labs brought 22 startups to SLUSH – the largest tech, design & start-up conference covering Northern Europe and Russia. This year it was attracting more participants than ever before with more than 3000 people in the first day at the Cable factory in the harbour of Helsinki.
Slush offered three start-up tracks for companies of different stages, ranging from pitching for seed funding to recruiting new talent to fueling business growth. Among the early stage category – the lightweight batch – the Finnish start-up Sharetribe, hosted by the Helsinki Co-location Centre, pitched well and ended up in the top 20 round.
Running out of business cards
Other EIT ICT Labs supported start-ups chose to promote their ideas in the expo of stands and a good indicator of promising leads was that almost everyone was running out of business cards in the second day.
- Thanks to EIT ICT Labs, Quuppa got excellent visibility towards investors and potential customers in SLUSH 2012. The event has barely ended and we've received already several emails and phone calls from customers who are eager to get our demo system!", said Kimmo Kalliola, CEO of Quuppa.
sQRmap, one of the Italian start-ups who were able to attend SLUSH thanks to the support by the EIT ICT Labs business development programme was very content with the outcome:
- Our product is already in the Italian market and now we are looking to grow in Europe. Pitching at SLUSH enabled me to meet with interested investors. With their funding support we are able to internationalize sQRmap", stated Diego Taglioni, one of the founders of sQRmap.
In the same category of more mature startups, so called middleweights, the Berlin based company Panospective got a lot of attention for their throwable panoramic camera ball and could leave with a significantly larger network of contacts.
Among the top four startups that made it to the finals were another throwable device – a microphone – by a Finnish startup Catchbox originating from Aalto University. Doggifit, a start-up from the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, one of the core partners of EIT ICT Labs, was viewed as to have an idea with good business potential and a large customer base. See winners in this TechCrunch article.
Watch the Lightweight pitching sessions
Photos from SLUSH
EIT ICT Labs sponsored startups at SLUSH:
AbelLife, Chrondox ,Clipflakes.tv, DoggiFit, Doremir, Facit, Innorange Oy, Inotive Solutions, Iscent Oy, Keeploop Oy, Latte+, Panospective GmbH, Quuppa Oy, Scolibri, Sharetribe, Shotbox, SOWISO, SQrMaps, Uxvibe, WeCook.fr, Wussap AB, Zebor Technology AB
