Startup Sauna Participants Announced
The Helsinki based Aalto Venture Garage is putting together in international incubation/acceleration program for very early stage projects that should turn to startups later this summer. In total, 17 teams from the region were accepted into the program from around the Baltic Sea. 3 teams were from Russia, 2 from Latvia, 1 from Lithuania and Estonia as well as Sweden and the rest were from Finland (9).
- Campalyst - An analytical platform for measuring ROI of social media.
- CoFoundIt - A crowd funding tool for app-developers, combining crowd sourcing and micro investing tools
- City Premises - A commercial real estate finder
- Double Defense - A sticker that can determine if your packages in the mail have been tampered with
- Fluorescent Nanoscopy - Nanoscale imaging to show biological specimens in 3D in their native environment
- FundFriend - A game that helps track your personal finances
- FutureFul - A predictive discovery engine
- Hakama - Customer availability & resource utilization analytics
- Mighty Fingers - A multiplayer tank game
- Ovelin - Combines gaming with music exercises for guitar
- Pazio - Storing and sharing your best team sports moments
- Solu - Value added services to mobile customers in Africa
- Spektikor - A device that monitors a victim’s pulse
- SunyRide - Social car-pooling service
- Tohina - A teamwork platform
- Twonicorn - Creates toys for social change
- Walkbase (ex-Mobio) - Verifying your check-ins on location-based services
The 17 teams will now work for a duration of six weeks at the co-working space to create and fine-tune their concepts into reality. The six weeks will feature guest speakers, other entrepreneurs and mentors to share their experiences and advice. On June 17th the teams will pitch on stage their results from the six weeks, in a somewhat similar manner to that of Y-Combinator.
Last year Aalto Venture Garage created Summer of Startups which was Finland focused and already this year they've managed to attract a very impressive crowd of companies. Overall, the 6-week program received over 200 applications. You can follow the development of the program on the Startup Sauna website.
Check out the live stream of the kickoff here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/start-up-sauna-kick-off
A small detail: Startup Sauna is the continuation of the previous Bootcamp programs. There will also be a Summer of Startups program this year. We had teams from Estonia, Latvia and Russia also previously, but this time was that the Garage team went outside of Finland to find the teams.
Looking forward to more collaboration with the region!
The Russian teams are struggling to get their visas. Hope they are able to join next week.
Ville and others, great work! I hope Russian teams will make it and you have some great products and startups by June. Good luck!