With only a couple of days left to apply to our fourth Seedcamp in Tel Aviv, taking place on 29th March, we want to ensure that, you don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to 
meet with some of the best local and international mentors around.
The partnership with lool.vc will give teams a great advantage, as they’ll gain a local support network as well as Seedcamp’s connections across Europe and the US.We’ve partnered with lool.vc, who are fantastic guys and have a strong local network, so – combining our resources – we have 70 fantastic mentors signed up to spend an intensive day mentoring the most talented and ambitious teams who have applied.
If you fit into that category – i.e. you have a startup and want to go places – then you have until 11.59pm on 1st March to submit your application here.
Want confirmation that the mentors are as good as we say they are? Here is a small teaser as to whom you can expect to meet and brainstorm around your business with:
We’d like to extend our gratitude to AFEKA College of Engineering for hosting us once again, this time at their wonderful new lab building. Thanks are also due to our yearly sponsors, Google, Microsoft BizSpark, PayPal and Qualcomm for their continual support.
Submit applications here before 11.59pm, Thursday, 1st March.
You may have realised that we’re currently on a huge tour of the US with the Seedcamp companies. Besides sharing our daily insights, checkins, and quotes on our new Tumblr, we wanted to give you an update of what we’re up to – and say thanks to all who have hosted us and helped us make the trip so special thus far.
We started our tour in New York – and it is incredible to be reminded that this was just a week ago. After settling in on Saturday, we started off with a bit of sightseeing and meeting friends on Sunday. In the afternoon, Neil at Hubitat was extremely kind to lend us space in their new office building while everybody was getting set up – with pitch training, general introductions, and of course a nice dinner (real American barbecue).
Monday brought us the first onslaught of impressions of the local startup scene. The kind folks at General Assembly invited us to their cool coworking/education space. We invited two of our own, ERPLY’s Kris Hiiemaa and Zemanta’s Bostjan Spetic to share insights and best practices from their move and setup in NYC. Michael Geer, who was one of the early team members of Badoo shared his insights on gaining the first million users for any web service; a session with lots of very practical takeaways.
The afternoon was spent at Etsy’s inspirational labs space, where Marc Hedlund, VP of Engineering, told us about the Etsy culture, the New York tech scene, and shared a few insights from his vast startup experience. The obligatory office tour contained more OMGs and HAVEYOUSEENTHISs than anything so far. It’s really a beautiful place that oozes of creativity. Afterwards, we went straight to Times Square, where Jon and Murat of the ER Accelerator welcomed us, and the Seedcampers spent some time mingling with their teams.
Tuesday was another packed day – an early breakfast with Meghan at 10gen, makers of MongoDB, taught us about working with the open source community and how to build a business around it. Jeff, Michael, and David from the Stackexchange team told us about their history and business, with an impressive view from their offices on the 25th floor.
The afternoon was packed with mentoring sessions at Google, with 80 of the best New York entrepreneurs, investors, and product folks to learn about the Seedcamp startups, and give them advice on their businesses. Set up like a Seedcamp day, these sessions included lots of exchange and discussions, and everyone left feeling stimulated, especially after the closing drinks.
Our last day in New York wasn’t any less busy. A great session at Tumblr, where Katherine Barna told us about the overall history and impressive stats (tumblr is now the 15th largest site in the US), and gave us a view of the engineering culture and the individual content teams. Our friends at Union Square Ventures invited us for lunch (thanks Andy and Gary!) to hear the Seedcampers pitch, and of course to give them feedback and share knowledge about trends that are emerging in the local tech scene. Afterwards, we met one of the oldest New York internet businesses: AOL and their Biz Dev groups, who clued the teams into the inside workings of one of New York’s giants.
Wednesday evening was a great ending for our stint in the Big Apple. Seedcamp week MC Evan Nisselson helped put together a great party at Dogpatch labs, a cool coworking space run by Polaris Ventures. Microsoft and Goodwin Procter were the kind sponsors, and we were warmly welcomed by a great crowd of entrepreneurs, investors, and folks we had met over the previous days – including of course the DogPatch and 500 startup crews in New York City.
We flew to Boston on Thursday, and the day was mostly consumed by mentoring sessions in the same fashion as New York. We were lucky to have some of the most successful Bostonian investors and Entrepreneurs joining us. Due to a somewhat smaller group, the atmosphere was more focused, but buzzing nonetheless. The intensity of these sessions was noted by the teams – thanks to all Boston mentors for their hard work and input.
Being hosted at Microsoft’s NERD center (thanks, Abby and Walter!), we had the chance to stay a little longer and host an intimate fireside chat with Brightcove’s CTO Bob Mason, who was part of the Brightcove IPO just one week earlier. After this inspiring story, the teams headed out to the local Venture Cafe event, and some stayed on for the Lean Startup Circle meetup, where Seedcampers Blossom.io had the chance to pitch their Lean project management tool to the entire Boston audience!
Friday started off with an incredibly warm welcome at Highland Capital. We certainly felt at home and the teams had a great time discussing their companies and markets with the team. Afterwards, we headed to Geek heaven: the MIT Media Lab. Our 2 hour tour included music playing robots, printed cuckoo clocks, the Lego lab, and many more technical and visionary insights delivered by Joost Bonsen, our friendly host. Ryan at the Changing Places Lab gave us some insights on future mobility before we headed off for a lunch hosted by the British Consulate General. We met some local entrepreneurs from around the city, and heard about UberVu, a Seedcamp company of 2008, from their CEO Mark who is now based in Boston. He shared his views about running a team across multiple time zones, and shed some light on the similarities of Boston with European thinking. Later, we toured the Cambridge Innovation Center – an office building in Kendall Square that is home to an incredible 450 startups and spent the evening at the loft at Bocoup, a design agency focused on open web technologies. A nice evening chat over dinner with entrepreneurs from Boston and Bocoup Founder Boaz Sender was a great way to finish off a buzzing first week of the Seedcamp tour.
Everything that’s happened so far on Tumblr.
All of the places we’ve been so far on Foursquare (shown on a Google Map).
All of the photos we took in New York on Flickr. And Boston.
Follow our Tumblr if you want to see what we are up to next – We have now arrived in San Francisco and are looking forward to see how the West Coast differs. The weather already gave us a warm Californian welcome!
We’re at it again. One of the 2 biggest marquee events (the other being Seedcamp Week) is coming up – our annual US trip, which will take our team and the recent Seedcamp companies (the March 2011 – Feb 2012 class) on a whirlwind tour of the United States’ startup and technology world.
Last Saturday we left London with about 20 Entrepreneurs, meeting more of them in New York City to kick off the first leg of our tour. In total, we are bringing along 19 companies (you can see a description of all of them here) to meet the best and brightest entrepreneurs, the most successful investors, and the most important startups and tech companies.
As mentioned on our website, the goals for the annual US trip are threefold:
We are holding mentoring sessions along the usual Seedcamp format in 4 major cities along the way. In New York, Boston, San Francisco and Mountain View, we will bring together around 50 to 60 of the local superstar entrepreneurs and investors to meet with the Seedcamp companies in brief mentoring sessions; sharing their experience, insights, and connections. This is a great opportunity to mingle with some of the most important startup builders in America, and make invaluable connections.
On top of the mentoring sessions, we are visiting some of the most important technology companies. We will be at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook, AOL, eBay/PayPal, Qualcomm… not only to build connections inside these organisations, but also to learn from their successes and mistakes, and to experience the culture they have built.
The startups we will see include Twitter, Foursquare, 10Gen (the makers of MongoDB), our own Zemanta and ERPLY, bocoup, Stackexchange, Tumblr and Etsy – and that’s only the East Coast.
We have learned in the past years that the connections to the US do not simply come from emailing and Skype calls, but much more so from spending time in the right places with the right people. Some of the earlier Seedcamp alumni like ERPLY, Zemanta, Rentmineonline, Vox.io, and Farmeron have already shown what the jump to the US makes possible.
The amount and nature of the meetings and events are designed to provide the largest amount of serendipitous shoulder rubbing™ – hopefully resulting in as much success in terms of deal making as before. Especially the West coast part of the excursion will bring us to the offices of the most active venture firms, and will without a doubt bring the pitching skills of our teams to the highest level.
The investors who are hosting us along the way include 500Startups, Andreesen Horowitz, AOL Ventures, Greylock Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Idealab, Index Ventures US, New Enterprise Associates, Union Square Ventures, S23P, Siemer VC, and SoftTech. Add to those the many investor mentors at the events, and in 4 weeks you can wake up a sleepy Seedcamp entrepreneur at 5am and hear a perfectly polished pitch.
Yes, it is somewhat of a class trip. We are all entrepreneurs, so a certain scrappiness is always part of the plan. Our teams are the happy first guests of the Startuphouse in San Francisco, where we’ll probably be able to shoot the first startup edition of Big Brother. We already know a lot of the friendly people we will meet on the way – but most certainly, by the end of it, we will have made many new friends.
We have built this beautiful Tumblr to document our day to day over the next few weeks. You will see photos, videos, blog posts, and of course other social media exhaust from us, the teams, and our friends along the way. You can follow it here, and you will also be notified if you follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
You can of course always get in touch with us if you are interested in being part of a mentoring session, or evening events.
Seedhack FinTech is getting closer! Inspired by our favourite hackathons (and the first Seedhack), we’re putting on an event from Friday 30th March to Sunday 1st April that is dedicated to disrupting the Financial sector through technological innovation, in partnership with Anthemis and Paypal.
Become a part of Seedhack FinTech here.
We’ll help you on the way to becoming the next big thing by providing a load of APIs to hack on, a great set of mentors and engineers from the Financial industry, and some inspirational thinking courtesy of Sean Park, founder of Anthemis. We’ve planned every aspect of the event to create the perfect environment to innovate.
Seedhack is going to be the first event ever to be held at the awesome new Google Campus. We’re super excited to show you all our new home, and this tailor-made campus in the heart of East London’s Tech City is sure to become a fixture of the London tech scene. Who knows, if you come up with an exciting enough idea, you might be able to get an office there!
On the API front we’re pleased to welcome a number of disruptive FinTech companies, including Paypal, the Currency Cloud, Transferwise and Bilbus. Keep an eye on the Seedcamp Twitter account for more API announcements, including a few big names that we think you may have heard of!
We’ve been really impressed with the quality and number of applications so far, and we wouldn’t want anyone to miss out, so please apply now to avoid disappointment.
Seedcamp London
Over 100 mentors and a record 22 teams joined us on 31st January for Seedcamp London. Thanks to iStockphoto, eOffice and Talk Talk, we had a fantastic venue in the heart of Soho and, true to the area, the buzz and energy throughout the day was intense. Seedcamp London was organised in our typical style of quick presentations from the teams, a masterclass panel and then an afternoon of intense mentoring sessions.
The winners We had a record number of applications for the event, so all the teams were immensely proud to be selected. We were very impressed by their shared enthusiasm, drive and ambition – a really positive atmosphere throughout the whole day.
Despite the fierce competition, four teams really won us over, and in two weeks’ time they – along with 15 other Seedcamp teams – will be travelling to the US with us to meet over 300 key players from both the East and West Coast. The US trip is a priceless opportunity for all our teams to refine their pitches, win new customers, form partnerships and of course attract further investment.
So who are the winners?
24symbols from Madrid, Spain What: Spotify for books. 24symbols is an HTML5 service that lets anyone read books (or sections of books) anywhere, with a freemium model. Why: There is a strong and growing demand for ebooks, and 24symbols is in an incredible position to disrupt this industry.
Bluefields from London, UK What: Bluefields intelligently organises amateur sport. Bluefields.com takes away the administrative burden, reducing a weekly organisational workload of around four hours to five minutes. Why: Bluefields joined us from Seedcamp Paris in December, and showed impressive capabilities at building a sleek platform to disrupt a common pain-point in amateur sports.
Checkthis from Brussels, Belgium What: Checkthis, a micro-publishing tool (between nothing and a blog), enables anyone to instantly publish and share webpages to sell an object, advertise a job, and do practically anything else you might want to do online. Why: We see huge potential in this beautiful product and are excited to add value along the way in their journey to growth.
Pult from Tallinn, Estonia What: Pult lets you stream your content to any screen with a browser. Pult’s platform transforms your smartphone into a hub that carries your identify and billing information. Why: As this is our sixth Estonian investment, we obviously have a soft spot for the incredible talent coming out of this country. The Pult team is very experienced and convinced us with their ambition and simple, but ingenious idea.
Thank you to: Everyone who attended Seedcamp London on 31st January, and all 22 teams who challenged the mentors and were eager to drive their business forward and seek advice from a room full of experts. All 112 mentors who gave up their precious time and expertise in order to help startups map out the road to success. Last but not least, we’d like to extent a huge thank-you to our generous Event Sponsors, iStockphoto, and our fantastic hosts, eOffice and TalkTalk, who all worked tirelessly to ensure the day was a success. And, of course, we can’t forget the invaluable contribution of our yearly sponsors, Microsoft BizSpark, Qualcomm and Google, who support Seedcamp on a ongoing basis. Also, we announced PayPal as a new partner for us – we’re looking forward not only to work with them here in Europe, but also to visit their US HQ during our trip.
What’s next? If you’re a startup wanting to get involved in the Seedcamp action, then applications are currently open to: • Seedcamp Tel Aviv, taking place on 27th March. See here for further information about the event and how to apply. • Seedhack FinTech, taking place on 30th–31st March and 1st April in London. We’re looking for talented developers who are keen to disrupt the financial world of technology. To join us, apply here.
Stay tunned for our coverage of the US trip!
The tech scene in Tel Aviv is bustling with activity, and ever since our last visit in 2011 we’ve seen a surge of new startups and interesting investments happening. On top of that, new investors, incubators, and workspaces are opening up – it’s therefore no surprise that we’re excited about returning to Israel for the fourth year running.
We’ll be hosting Seedcamp Tel Aviv on Thursday 29th March in partnership with lool ventures, long time friends and partners in crime in Israel. It’s exciting to be partnering with a local partner who shares so many core values with us. With a great team being lead by Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissentaum, and their strong base of mentors, we’re sure this event will be bigger and better than ever before. The partnership will go one step further than just organization of the event: we’ll jointly be investing in the winners, giving the startups both a local and international support network. lool ventures is in the perfect position to offer local teams the longer term support they require, with Seedcamp providing strong links to the US and mainland Europe. AFEKA College of Engineering has been kind enough to invite us back to host Seedcamp Tel Aviv at their beautiful premises – we’re based in their new lab building this year.
Like always, we welcome applications from across the world, so if you’re a startup going places, apply now! Make sure to tell us what makes you unique, and why you’re the next big thing. Companies innovating internet technology, mobile, and social business models are most welcome – just as much as we love b2b focused startups disrupting big industries. Check out our current portfolio to see what excites us: scalable businesses, innovative technology, and interesting markets.
First of all, to spend a day with great teams and mentors that can bring your company forward. We will have the cream de la creme of the Israeli tech scene coming as mentors, and according to a past participant, “you will meet more useful people in a day than normally in a year”. This is a great opportunity to meet investors, advisors, and the greatest product experts, that can help you bring your company to the next level.
If your company is selected to join the Seedcamp Family, you will not only be able to take part in our monthly meetups in London, Seedcamp Week, and the annual US trip – our partnership with lool ventures will give you plenty of hands on support, and having one of the most connected Israeli early stage funds is surely a great way to grow your business.
We receive a lot of applications from eager and talented entrepreneurs for each Seedcamp event, so ensure you spend time articulating the vision of your company, and your progress so far. Standing out from the crowd is key.
Six months ago, we had our very first Seedhack event. The idea was simple, what if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format help foster great new startups that address untapped needs? Well, we tried it, and it did… read about it here.
We are now getting ready to release the next version of Seedhack with new features and a new focus: Financial Technology. We expect to be blown away by the awesome ideas and solutions hacked together for the Financial industry.
We have a great set of relevant speakers, API’s and startups including:
More big names will be announced in the run up to the event, and we’re really excited about working with our event partners – both current and future – to bring something new and interesting to the FinTech space.
So if you want to be a part of disrupting the Financial technology, please register here.
The event will take place at a location in central London. The schedule of events will be further clarified at a later date, however the rough outline is as follows:
The purpose of Seedhack FinTech is to create disruptive solutions to problems that exist in the Financial sector. As such, if you are an idea person, a developer, or have some skillset that is useful for a new company, then you should apply!
Please note however that this isn’t an event designed to cater to startups wanting to hire developers, please go to our friends at the Silicon Milk Roundabout for that. Additionally, if you are already employed, but want to start a new company anyway, make sure that you are not bound by any non-compete or other intellectual property limitations.
We look forward to see you there, register now!
Follow @sc_seedhack for updates!
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