Summer Of Startups Demo Day (Updated)
Summer of Startups in Aalto Venture Garage reached a climax today as the ten companies that have been founded over the summer went on stage and to pitch their products and services. The companies have gone through two months of development and today their progress was measured. A jury of 5 members judged the development and gave feedback to the companies. The jury was Sami Heikkiniemi from Tekes, Antti Aarnio from Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship, Juha Ruohonen from Aalto Venture Garage, Kristo Ovaska from Aalto Venture Garage and Ramine Darahiba theHead Coach for Summer of Startups.
This was the first time something of this magnitude was organised to help create startups. It was a major effort put forward by Aalto Venture Garage and having seen the quality of the pitches, I have to say these groups are top notch startup potential. Not only did the quality of the pitches surprise me, but the readiness to present in front of the crowd with prototypes or very well developed service demos. There were no groups without some sort of demo and thus Demo Day in its meaning was a success from the organisers - the young companies are now well on their way to further developing their products and services.
The winner of the Demo Day was Arada Services, a company which aims to bring simplicity and efficiency in purchasing travel tickets with mobile phones. The company had already a working demo and a very realistic approach to the problem, especially from the go-to-market point of view.
Runners up, or the companies that won the Best Progress as well as the Best Demo category were Pamoja Innovations and Living Canvas, respectively. According to Ramine Darabiha, Pamoja Innovations was a bunch of consultants without scalable products or product ideas - this however changed in three weeks and the company eventually came up with a digester solution that is able to create energy for much below the market prices, albeit a large investment upfront for the solution.
Living Canvas took home the Best Demo award with a 3-metre tall and 1,5 metre wide wall that reminded of a rain forest. The wall was covered with exotic plants and the innovation was able to water the plants for a duration of 8 minutes daily and all the extra water would get reused the next day. Selling somewhere around 3000 euros for a modular piece, it was a beautiful although a little pricey piece of design.
Below are the companies in random order and a little analysis on how they performed.
- MiDA – a mobile service to scan and collect info of your diet in real-time
MiDA wanted to bring a bar code scanner to the mobile to help determine nutrition values from foods. A great idea, although they did have some challenges in gathering the nutrition information from foods as well as including a little bit too many features in their application. Possible uses for such a product with a little bit of focus though. - Incspark – “Internal Facebook for companies”
Incspark is approaching a somewhat competed area of productivity applications. However, an interesting change to the pitches was that the company had actually a client of the product pitch it to the crowd. Although he couldn't answer all the specifics of the plans, it was a refreshing change to the ways of pitching. - Arada Services – provides easy and affordable access to inter city transportation via mobile phone in East Africa
Arada Services, the winner of the Demo Day, had a solid concept with a working demo as well a very realistic approach to the solution. Strong pitch with well laid out arguments made this a strong winner. - Living Canvas – creates “Rainforest in a box” for office spaces.
Living Canvas began their pitch by breaking plant pots to show the difficulty of having house hold plants. Although there were some demo effects with the slide show, as were with other companies' as well, Living Canvas did awe the audience with their demo - a huge wall of exotic plants with a working watering system. - Refetch – location-based reminders (ex: “buy toothpaste” when in supermarket)
Refetch is a GTD based application with a twist - instead of keeping a constant list of things to do, why not remind yourself with those items once you reach the spot where the action for that item must be taken. A neat idea, but the pitch lacked edge to still remember the company and the idea after a while. - Octarine – Helps to organize information from your social networks around your life experiences
Somewhat of a solid pitch with an interesting idea. However, I think the examples could have been slightly more thought out - then again, not a lot of development can be done in a time period of two months. - Buffee – a platform for social games to collect feedback from users regardless of their mother tongue
An idea to tackle a huge market, but somehow they failed to arouse my interest - despite being a former game company sales director. - eXperQ – increasing customer-company interaction to make the world a better place to be a customer
A different kind of an approach to get customer feedback with mobile phones. Refreshingly, the company had also thought of other aspects such as showing the data in a valubale way instead of focusing on technology. Furthermore, some thought had been put into the collection of data as well, which was well demoed during the pitch in interaction with the audience. - Pamoja Innovations – promotes development of greentech and renewable energy in East Africa
Pamoja Innovations, claimed to be a group of consultants at the start of the program, came up with an innovative way to create an energy source for people in Africa. Interestingly the financing of the product for local people had also been thought out well as even microloans were part of the solution to sell their product. - Dealmachine – Deal Machine is all about exciting sales. The web service rewards salespeople for every step they take towards a sale
Despite not winning anything, Dealmachine was both in their pitch and product concept my clear favorite. Adding game mechanics to enterprise level software is a great way to add motivational pushes for the users. Also, DealMachine's pitch included a marketing video which leaned on many cliches in a positive way and did get the audience laughing every now and then.
All in all, a very lean and interesting way to get 10 companies well off their feet and on their way to new opportunities. I sincerely hope this will become a tradition with Aalto Venture Garage, even though the concept is still somewhat looking for its place in the Finnish growth ecosystem. With events like these, it will become an easy concept to love and praise.
Photos by Lari Haataja
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Nice thing that you elaborated the implications of the DemoDay! As a participant myself, the most impressive thing about the program was the progress all teams went through.
If you heard pitches from the entry competition, you know what I'm thinking about!
The atmosphere at the Venture Garage was truly fantastic yesterday! The teams had done a great job preparing for the demo day; their prototypes had a very potential and credible air about them, while pitches had been prepared with razor sharp training.
Thanks Antti for giving these young entrepreneurs feedback; startups can never have enough of it!
In the history of Aaltoes and Aalto Venture Garage the Summer of Startup program has made the most impact to Finnish society and startups in terms of:
1: Cultural change towards more startup friendly
2: Educating young entrepreneurs who will build the next success stories from Finland
3: Building the actual companies: Demos, products, Customers, Business model ect.
4: Getting media coverage in and outside of Finland
Thanks to Ville Simola (Aaltoes), Ramine Darabiha (Coach), Olli Gunst (Hankenes) Anna Bessanova (Hues) to make this happen.
No one else in Finland have been able to do this before! I truly hope for Finland sake that the success will encourage even more initiatives like this!
k.o
I think this has been a huge thing for the Finnish startup scene. Congratulations to all the startups and also the organizers! Like Kristo, I hope that we'll see even more initiatives like this in Finland.
I could personally imagine using at least three of these products:
1) Dealmachine, game mechanics = the next black!
2) MiDa, for people who exercise and think about their diet more than usual. Also perfect for super food consumers
3) ReFetch, I always forget something when I'm shopping groceries. ReFetch would be a very nice fix to that
I wasn't involved in this program but it seems to be the best way to "study" startup entrepreneurship. Awesome guys, just awesome!
It has been great to see the progress of the teams, the drive and the atmosphere at the Garage when i've visited there.
These are just the kind of programs we need to change the culture and mindset of students towards entrepreneurship.
Thanks to all the organizers and teams for taking the initiative and acting as a role model for others!
As Kristo pointed out, we need more of these initiatives around Finland. Let's hope that there is enough courage and will to build these kind of programs in the other cities also.
Already waiting what will be the next initiative pushing though the Garage doors. Keep up the good work!
Great job for all who was involved in creating Summer of Startups. Just what is needed to excite people and I bet next summer of startups will be even bigger!
Excellent initiative, I've followed SoS with huge interest. Thanks, Kristo, Ramine, Ville & al.
Summer Of Startups is a great idea that will change many things in Finland for sure! Soon Y-Combinator will be checking those guys pages to see what's happening in the world of startups!!
Congrats to all the teams for their efforts, and was great to see that technical and also non-technical teams (living canvas) were present, meaning that the idea is what it counts!
Cheers!
Thanks. I really thank the teams for the amazing work. At the end of the day, it's not about the speakers or money or whatever, we need to get more great teams.
There are a few things I want to improve next year, such as bringing more foreign VCs and making the application process more transparent. We were very good at getting coverage, but I think it's a shame Techcrunch, Mashable and Venturebeat didn't cover us. Maybe next time :P
The application process was unclear, without a clear explanation of what we were looking for (a point which I had to address in a blog post). The teams were not prepared to do proper pitches (though as judges of the competition, we were surprised by their quality). Some thought this was a study course and put less efforts in the beginning. They also felt that the amounts of paperwork were very cumbersome.
Still, the result was really good: I think everyone's learned important things, and we've probably helped make their future projects more successful, which is great for Finland.
Fantastic work all the way around!
Below are some of the interesting points from my perspective.
1. SoS proved that people can be motivated to work HARD and LONG during the Finnish Summer. Every time I visited the garage, weekday, weeknight, weekend, there were people hard at work. That is very clearly what it takes to make an innovative idea happen.
2. Cross-university cooperation very alive. There were team members from roughly 10 universities from 4 continents. Many universities in Finland represented as well. Never saw ANY friction, only teamwork. That’s awesome1
3. Amazingly appreciative international participants. Roughly 50% of the participants were non-Finns, and all I talked to at the end felt that this was an amazing experience. As a foreigner in Finland for 15 years, I found this the most truly global community that I have seen.
4. Very interesting confirmation of my initial gut feeling that the Arada would win. Their idea at the beginning (updating social networks with SMS) I felt was week, but that the team was strong and would find a model that would work in their home countries in East Africa. They did. Really impressive!!
5. Great ecosystem support. Wow, the support came out of the woodwork! Great list of speakers from the business and investment community. Keep it coming during the Bootcamp!
6. Total commitment from the team at the Garage and AES in general. Not going to mention all of you but you are good! Also is great to integrate more and more with the emerging student entrepreneurship movement across Finland and the Baltic Rim.
7. Ramine’s blogging was instrumental. It is now time to get strong visibility to Garage activities, we need to get more and more global initiatives to come to Finland and realize it is a great place to set up, as well as to come here and join local startup and growth companies.
8. The return on investment was excellent. The disappointments to me were mostly that our infrastructure is still pretty crude and i.e. we could not make the audio work on the live feed (as far as I could tell). We need to invest a little into getting the infra to be totally reliable, but not so much to lose the grassroots feel.
Looking forward now going to another win in the upcoming bootcamp!
Will
A very good event for the Finnish startup community. Those startup look very promising. Hopefully we get more of them in the (near) future.
-aku
Thanks for summarizing the results. I had been following the happenings at SoS roughly through social media during the summer, and this post was really interesting to read in sense of getting a picture how the start-up teams have involved..
I hope that in the near future we can see similar programs going on in Turku area as well, and if not totally own there is definitely the chance to link smaller scale activities/programs from Turku to SoS and BootCamp etc..!
-Mikko
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