Venture Cup Finland Chooses Finalists For Million Euro Prize
Venture Cup Finland has chosen the seven finalists that will compete for the million euro prize money. We rumoured of this back in October 2008 and the competition, along with the amount of prize money. The prize itself won't be an immediate million euros in the bank account, but an admission to the Finnish Tekes' innovative young companies -pipeline.
The jury that has done the picking includes Risto Siilasmaa (F-Secure), Hannu Järvinen (Tekes), Will Cardwell (Technopolis Ventures), Moaffak Ahmed (Veturi), Pekka Roine (InnoSpa), Heikki Mäkijärvi (Accel), Petri Laine (Vera Venture), Michael Panaccio (Starfish Ventures), Margus Uudam (Ambien Sound Investments), Tsvika Ben-Porat (Maayan Ventures) as well as Daniel Blomquist (Creandum). A pretty comprehensive line-up indeed.
The companies that have been picked as the finalists are in no particular order ClaroVision, Ekogen, Entetrainer, Navigil, Oncos Therapeutics, Pixpolar and ZenRobotics. Unfortunately many of the companies have decided to neglect their web presence so it is very difficult for the public to know what they are after.
The companies come from multiple industries. They divide into entertainment, hardware manufacturers, clean tech companies as well as medicare companies, just to mention some. The winner of the competition will be announced on June 9th in Ravintola Sipuli, Helsinki.
Update: The event is organised on June 9th - this has been corrected to the text as well. Apologies for that.
TEKES Finances 9 Innovative Young Companies
We have found out that regarding, the Finnish government funding agency, TEKES' controversial Young Innovative Companies financing - 9 companies have passed the tighter application procedure and secured themselves a good backing from the organisation. TEKES has created the program to substantially increase the pace of growth and internationalisation for these future promises.
The companies in question are 7Signal, Astarte, Footbalance System, Navigil, Nidecon Technologies, RM5 Software, Ubipart, Whatamap.com and Wristop Technologies. These companies have passed on to the first phase, meaning that TEKES will cover certain costs up to €250.000. The best of these will pass on to the second phase where the funding goes up to €750.000.
It's interesting to see that there are no web startups and the companies are mainly from the healthcare and software industries. Then again, this is a safer route as these markets are already existing and annually represent multibillion euro turnovers.
How do you find the list? Is TEKES betting on the wrong horses here?
