UPDATE: We have prolonged the application period until EOD 21st of September 2010, as many teams have written in during Seedcamp Week. You can still apply here – please let us know about your great business!
Yes, that’s right – we are going abroad again, this time to the east! Singapore is an exciting location, having embarked on the entrepreneurship train later, but with a vengeance. All indicators show that the activity and dedication of local entrepreneurs is ticking up, including the number of businesses started, expectation of founders, financing, and people employed.
What a better place would there be to expand our Seedcamp model – even more when having amazing local partners on board.
We are proud to announce our venture east with opening the application system for Seedcamp Singapore on the 5th of October this year. Find the place to let us know about your great business here – we are looking for great internet technology companies from all over Singapore and South East Asia.
We are already in talks with some great sponsors and mentors for this event, so please keep an eye out for further announcements about Seedcamp Singapore!
At Seedcamp, we are still a very tiny team – we are only 2.5 full time employees, thankfully supported by eager interns and formidable fellows every now and then. Over the past couple of years, we have added more and more Seedcamp events to the calendar, now even reaching out beyond Europe. This increase of reach makes it challenging to keep up with a small team, so we are looking for two people to join us.
First is the Events and Sponsors Manager position – we need you to help us organising all the nitty gritty around Seedcamp events, finding partners and sponsors, and making the events run as smoothly as they ever have. Obviously, this position also covers a wide array of tasks in the back office like overseeing the application process, PR initiatives, outreach to the community and other exciting Seedcamp projects that we want to start in the coming months. If you are experienced in public relations, event organisation and related areas and enthusiastic about the startup and tech scene in Europe, apply for this position – more info here.
The second open position is a longer term internship, as our current intern Indre is leaving for Lithuania at the end of August. We are looking for a high-powered student or graduate with an impressive academic background to help out around the office and events for about 3 to 6 months. If you are passionate about startups and are thinking about being a founder yourself: This is the best opportunity to meet people, find out about the european tech scene, and kick around ideas with smart people. Find more details here.
Both positions are based in London – feel free to reach out and apply by emailing Philipp. Please include information about your background, experience, your work with startups and tech companies, and everything else you feel is relevant for the job. The job descriptions for the Events and Sponsors Manager and internship positions should tell you more about our requirements.

Last week we held our first out-of-Europe Seedcamp event in South Africa, and it was a full on success. We were already delighted by the high quality during the application process – the event itself turned out to be even more impressive.

After the usual short pitches by teams in the morning, the teams broke up into the mentoring sessions to take in all of the knowledge the mentors were ready to share. We shared some information on Seedcamp and our foray into new geographies after lunch, followed by another batch of mentoring sessions.
The overall energy and the startups’ thirst for knowledge was really inspiring – it was clear that the mentors’ input was highly valued by all the participants. All sessions needed to be almost violently broken up to keep up with the schedule, which is always the best indication for great discussions.
The popular vote showed Cognician and iSigned to be the darlings of the audience – two teams tackling complex problems with some elegant ideas and solutions.
We want to say a big thank you to all of the great mentors who took all of their day to help Seedcamp and the participating teams to grow and go forward. Gareth Knight, the organiser of the Tech4Africa conference helped us to find some really outstanding mentors from different backgrounds – we had visitors from all disciplines of venture capital, angel investors, successful founders and company builders, bloggers, advisors, and strong support from large local and international technology companies.
The day would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors: Google helped with the welcome drinks the night before, the Gordon Institute of Business Science was a brilliant venue with nice breakout spaces, Microsoft sponsored lunch, and Vunanitech pitched in as well.
If you have any plans of visiting South Africa soon – we can not recommend it more. The local entrepreneurship scene is growing, there is very strong mutual support, and South Africans are quite simply amazing hosts. Tech4africa, which was held on the day after Seedcamp, was a great testament to that.
Some of the teams also blogged about their experiences:

As we announced back in July, we are very excited to move beyond the European borders to find even more great startups and founders. Our first stop is Johannesburg, South Africa, and we will be holding the mini Seedcamp Johannesburg already next week.

Thanks to our local partners we have gotten a great response to our call for applications. We selected 11 teams to participate and we are looking forward to hear presentations from the following teams:
The event will take place at the impressive Gordon Institute for Business Science in Johannesburg and we have already lined up some great mentors to help the startups get to the next level. Amongst others, expect the country’s top venture capital firms, successful entrepreneurs, and representatives from large and small technology companies.
Mini Seedcamp London is over and it was by far the most intense Mini Seedcamp of the year. We had more teams, mentors, applications, sessions (and coffee) than ever before and spent a great day with the best startups from all over Europe.
The participating teams were from as far as Turin, Moscow, and Warsaw, others came from Germany, Scotland and – shocking – London proper. After a short kick-off with Reshma’s introduction to Seedcamp and an update on the programme, the teams set off for the first mentoring sessions with their mentors. Due to the unusually high number of participating mentors, the teams had their pockets bulging with business cards already by lunchtime.
After a first break, we had the pleasure of listening to Saul interviewing an excellent panel of former venture capitalists that decided to switch sides to become entrepreneurs (again). Avid Larizadeh, Greg Marsh, and Max Niederhofer were not shy to talk about their insights into the decisions of taking VC or Angel money, deciding on a viable business model, and pointing out that they were all actually entrepreneurs turned VCs and back – an important distinction.
After exhausting themselves in the mentoring sessions for the rest of the day, everybody was eager to hear the final selection of startups by popular vote and to finally get to the bowling alley for closing drinks.
Amongst all the participating mentors and teams, we want to say another big thank you to our sponsors and supporters for the day – Orrick and m8capital made the evening event possible, IBM Global Entrepreneur pitched in for lunch, and our long standing partners, Spark PR, UKTI and Sun Startup Essentials helped support us once again to make it all possible.
Our supporters who helped spread the word for us around the EMEA included – Ballou PR, Startup Business, Maestros Del Web, Arctic Startup, Techcelerate and Startup Digest; without them we would not have had such an amazing application response for Mini Seedcamp London.
Last but not least, we are forever grateful to UCL Advances for providing the fantastic venue for Mini Seedcamp London and we can’t wait to get back there for Seedcamp Week in September.
Also check out some of the other posts being written about Mini Seedcamp London (tell us about more in the comments):