On November 27th, eight top ICT startups from Sweden and Finland visited Munich with the aim of establishing contacts with German industry corporations and venture capital investors. The event was a co-arrangement between the Stockholm based business accelerator STING, Fraunhofer and Munich Network and was made possible by the support of EIT ICT Labs.
“Germany is the closest and one of the largest markets for Nordic companies and we want to offer an opportunity for our start-ups to initiate new contacts here that could eventually lead to business and long term relationships” said Maria Nilsson, Access to Finance Manager at the business accelerator STING and EIT ICT Labs in her welcoming address.
Julia Schmalenberg, Business Developer at Fraunhofer and EIT ICT Labs continued “The fact that EIT ICT Labs facilitates this type of cross European meeting places and brings together young aspiring companies with major industry leaders is a truly great thing that will drive innovation and speed up the development of the start-ups”. During the half day event, the startups pitched to the audience. For example, Aachen and Stockholm based Centive Solutions presented its software platform enabling user to step inside any 3D model.
“We are here to meet with companies who would be interested in running pilot projects with us and also to make contact with potential investors” said Ville Stohne, COO and Co-founder.Antti Korhonen, CEO of Helsinki based Leia Media, was very clear with his main objective with the visit to Munich, “we are looking for funding to realize the mission of Leia Media. We are going to deliver information globally in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner, through our revolutionary ePaper solution”, he said.
Unomaly was another EIT ICT Labs company that attracted significant interest from a number of the large companies that attended the event. Unomaly provides a new self learning, data driven and change oriented way of monitoring critical systems.
“We are on the look-out for new customers, but also potential partnerships here in Germany”, said Matias Cuba, VP Sales & Marketing of Unomaly.
After generous networking breaks, a number of one-to-one meetings took place, enabling the participants to initiate dialogues that hopefully will proceed after the event.
Some of EIT ICT Labs’ core partners participated, e.g. Siemens and SAP, as did other world leading industry corporations like Fujitsu, Bosch and 3M. On the investor side venture capital firms like Early Bird Ventures, Munich Venture Partners and Creathor Ventures attended the event.
The startup Vikings from the North left Germany satisfied with a number of new contacts to follow-up and inspiration for pan European collaborations.For a complete list of participating startups, please click here >>
