Scred Founders Win Mini-Seedcamp Stockholm With Holvi
Some time back we covered the finalists participating in Mini-Seedcamp Stockholm. The list featured 14 companies from the region. Overall, 20 companies were selected to pitch at the event. While Seedcamp Stockholm was planned to be held as an event to find the participant to the Seedcamp New York trip, the Seedcamp team decided to announce “a winner” from the event. The winner, ie. the company that Seedcamp will invest into, is Holvi, by the founders of Scred.
Seedcamp Stockholm On May 4th, Applications Open Until April 17th
Seedcamp is coming up Stockholm on May 4th to find the gems of the region and connect them to investors and other people that can help them go forward. "We've seen a very strong group of startups coming out of the Nordics, and especially the technically focused teams are impressive", Philipp Moehring from Seedcamp stated. We recently covered GrabCad's success in winning both Seedcamp London and being accepted into TechStars, which should be a sign to everyone that the talent required is very much present at the region.
Lithuania Steps Up its Game
Finland and Estonia aren’t the only growing hotbeds for entrepreneurship in the Baltics. Since our coverage a few months ago, the Lithuanian startup community has made very significant progress placing the country on the entrepreneurial map. Here is an overview of these recent developments.
Mini Seedcamp Copenhagen Opens For Applications
Seedcamp, the European seed investment program that originated in London has opened its Nordic Mini Seedcamp for applications. This year the Mini Seedcamp takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark 27th May 2010.
Mini Seedcamp Copenhagen is a one day event aiming to connect the 20 best web-tech, mobile and software startups with some of the leading entrepreneurs, developers, and experts from the European tech ecosystem.
Last year Seedcamp's Nordic event took place in Helsingborg, Sweden and attracted a decent line-up of startups. That said, there is definitely room for more quality applicants, not least from Finland. You can see our coverage from last year here.
Witsbits - Cloud Computing Sold In A Box
Whether you're running a business or organizing a tech conference today, it's all about the cloud. I talk to startups talking to venture capitalists, and there's no way of pitching without having ones solution running in the cloud. As hard it's been to agree on a proper definition for cloud computing, it's been the thing for both service providers and businesses to move on to. Even the telecom companies are now getting into the game of cloud computing.
Not surprisingly cloud computing was also one of the buzz words at the recently held Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg, where Witsbits caught my attention when pitching their new business model.
Witsbits, a Swedish startup company, is the first and so far only actor in the Nordic and Scandinavian region providing cloud computing services. They started already in 2004, in the era when cloud computing still was called utility computing. The journey into cloud computing began in 2003 when running Render Planet, an automated render farm service offering free, remote, distributed rendering over the Internet. Rendering 3D images required a lot of hardware resources, which resulted in developing their own utility management software. The first cloud computing service saw its daylight, and Witsbits today is a profitable business with number of customers in their storage cloud. Now with cloud computing booming the company feels it's time to refocus on their core competence, the software development.
Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg - Sunshine Story In The Pouring Rain
Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg was held today in the Southern Sweden together with Öresund Entrepreneurship Academy. The region is growing and has an active ecosystem of entrepreneurship and startups, suiting well the Seedcamp initative. The event gathered 20 excited startups and over 50 mentors from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and England.
The day was kicked off with five minute pitches by the teams, and included buzz words such as cloud computing, crowdsourcing and smartphone applications. The pitches were overall above the average, but as Tommy Ahlers, a mentor from ZYB, reflected, the early stage startups preferably need to focus on the concept rather than trying to present a business plan.
Event Roundup - Seedcamp, Barcamp And ArcticEvening Coming Up
There's couple of interesting events well worth visiting coming up.
First one, BarCamp is happening on 4th April in central Helsinki, Finland. Since it's BarCamp anything is possible. Come along, propose a session, and if there is interest from someone else, then you are up. So prepare things in advance! Un-conference does not mean un-prepared. Sessions can be any format; discussion, Presentation, demo, workshop, the limiting factor is time (and can you make it interesting!). Read more here.
Swedish Startups in the Valley
Saplo's founder and CEO Mattias Tyrberg tipped us that Saplo, the Swedish semantic text processing technology firm, and a winner of Seedcamp, is going to participate in two VC events in California (previous coverage of Saplo). While in the area, Mattias and Fredrik Hörte from Saplo will also visit a few big firms like Google and Facebook, and look for other potential partners, customers, and investors.
The first event is Mini Seedcamp, which aims to give the startups a chance to meet face-to-face with the local startup and investor scene, and discuss anything from their product to investments. Seedcamp hopes to give the Valley folks better understanding of European startups, and show the participating European startups the US entrepreneurship culture in action, and help them connect with advisors and mentors.
Another event is organized by Invest in Sweden Agency North America (ISA). ISA has gathered a delegation of 20 Swedish early stage wireless, IT, electronics, and internet startups seeking risk capital, and takes them in front of some of the biggest VC firms in the US. The event takes place tomorrow November 11th in Menlo Park, CA. ISA is reporting to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and markets Sweden, its industry clusters, funds and individual businesses to North American companies and investors.
