Zagreb skyline

Zagreb skyline (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are happy to announce that we will be returning to Zagreb on 12 June in search of the best local and European startups. Our second event after the 2010 Zagreb-based Seedcamp will be hosted at the University College for Applied Computer Engineering.

Who should apply? In the past few years we’ve had some very strong teams from the region join the Seedcamp family such as Zemanta, Vox.io and Oust.me from Slovenia, Brainient and uberVU from Romania, and of course Croatia’s own Fameron and GIS Cloud. While we strongly encourage talented webtech, software and mobile startups from Croatia and its neighbouring countries from Slovenia and Turkey to Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to apply, our open door policy means that any startup from across the Europe, the Middle East and Africa – and beyond – can apply.

What are we looking for? If you’re new to Seedcamp, we like teams with ‘bags full’ of talent, drive, ambition and the capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Seedcamp event brings.

What can I expect if I’m selected? A lot! You’ll meet, network with and be mentored by top industry leaders, international investors, seasoned entrepreneurs and product/biz dev experts. A day at Seedcamp can propel your startup forward in terms of relationships that normally take years to build. Seedcamp events are not a conference but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support and a programme designed to strengthen and catapult your ideas to make you a world-class company.

How do I apply? Applications are now open until 20th May, so get going and tell us about what you’ve been working on. We look forward to pouring over your awesome ideas and being blown away with what the talent for Seedcamp Zagreb will bring.

Application page.

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The view from the Bertelsmann Roof Terrace

We’ve been busy in the past weeks preparing Seedcamp Berlin – happening on May 15 – with our friends and investors at BDMI, who are kindly hosting us this time around. We held a small office hour session last week in Berlin, and are doing the same again in London this Friday – see here for details. The idea behind these session is to allow startups to meet the Seedcamp team, openly ask any questions they might have about us or the Seedcamp process, and learn some tricks about how to submit a better application.

Our best mentors, for Berlin!

Also, we have selected some of our best international and local mentors to join us for the day, giving advice and input to the startups that we’re ultimately looking to select. Check a small selection of that list below – these are folks who have been rated especially high by previous Seedcamp teams, and we are excited to have them as mentors again:

We look forward to these and more than 50 other mentors to spend the day with us and the startups. Based on the current applications, it’s going to be an amazing selection of teams from all over Europe.

A special program, just for Berlin

On top of the usual Seedcamp program, we are proud to also announce that BDMI has moved mountains to make it possible to not only host the event at Bertelsmann’s beautiful representation in the middle of Berlin, but also have a live band for the evening event! It sure comes in handy to have investors that own a record label, and we are looking forward to enjoy some tunes from The Pickers, a Berlin local indie rock band. Seedcamp Berlin will feature a master class with the founders of DailyDeal, who sold their company to Google late last year. We are looking forward to hear stories from both the founder and investor side, moderated by Nicolas Gabrysch, Partner at Osborne Clarke.

Some frequently asked questions

Based on the feedback at the Berlin open office session, we want to reiterate a few details about applications that might be helpful for those looking to apply:

 

Are you an early stage founder in London? Do you know someone who is?

After our first office hours session in Berlin last week, we decided to host a second session in London. Seedcamp Berlin is on May 15, and the application period for the event is running until April 25th. Thus, it’s the perfect time to meet us and ask a few questions if you are planning to apply. Come by to chat about Seedcamp, ask us anything you’d like to know about Seedcamp, and meet fellow founders.

Come by if you:

Let us know you will be there by filling in this short form.

We are planning the event to be very casual and open.

Location: Campus, 4-5 Bonhill Street, Shoreditch

Time & Date: 14:00-16:00, April 20, 2012

Seedcamp Estonia

We’ve been excited for some time now to visit the small country with big talent where a significant proportion of our teams originate. Finally the week is upon us and we’re packing our warm clothes to visit Tallinn on the 18th April. We have a fantastic range of international and local mentors joining us including some great investors. Applications to Estonia were very strong with many of the surrounding countries applying as well as countries as far away as USA, proving that Tallinn has a dynamic startup scene going on. Quality was top-notch and we’re delighted to have a whooping 8 local teams represented and others joining us from Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Russia. Also flying in are teams from Sweden, France, UK and Slovenia. It seems to have all the ingredients lined up to make it a great interactive day where hopefully many fruitful relationships will be built and carried forward.

The Teams

Partners and Sponsors

We have been very flattered by the tremendous local and regional support shown to us by our sponsors for Seedcamp Tallinn: SkypeEnterprise Estonia and our own Erply. In addition, Estonia IT College has very kindly offered to host Seedcamp Tallinn, Garage48 has supported in many ways and have organized the evening networking drinks. This way, we ensure mentors and teams have a good time whilst in Tallinn and make the most of interacting with the locals and each other. Our own teams at TransferWise and Holvi have also contributed heavily by sharing their mentor network and promoting Seedcamp to the region. Of course, our yearly sponsors are not to be forgotten for their ongoing support; BizsparkQualcommGoogle and Paypal.

See you in Estonia!

What does a bank designed for the needs of a six year-old have in common with an iPhone app designed to help you donate money to a religious organization and a system to help spot issues with legal documents? Well, they were all spawned out of Seedcamp’s recent Seedhack FinTech which took place 30th, 31st March and 1st April. We had over one hundred energetic and entrepreneurial hackers register to take part in the event in the purpose-built Campus by Google and enabled by our generous sponsors: Paypal, Domain.me, and 10gen.

Friday night’s kick off was led by a keynote speech from Michael Rolph, Director at Anthemis Group, a leading Financial Technology investment firm. He highlighted how a key part of the financial tech investment opportunities involves bringing additional transparency between those that manage capital and those that invest or use capital. The old model of a few people exploiting inefficiencies in information are over as new startups increasingly democratize the information necessary to make better financial decisions.

After the keynote, we had our API speakers present what their companies did, as well as how their technology could be used within the context of a new project. Our API presenters were:

Following the talks from our speakers, the attendees had the chance to mingle, eat some great food courtesy of @centralworking and bounce ideas off of each other. Once done, the group headed back upstairs to go into a pitch rally of ideas. After the pitch rally, everyone settled in for a late night of hacking away on their respective ideas.

By late afternoon Saturday, 16 companies had been formed and were mentored by our Judges which included:

What’s amazing is that in spite of having little sleep, the companies had tons of energy and were still struggling with how to make certain ideas work and getting their MVPs ready until late into the evening.

On Sunday, crunch time started at 4pm as all the weary-eyed hackers commenced their final pitches. Below is a summary of the top three companies formed (that presented), what the project was about, and who the members were. The best Demo award went to Holy Light, with the runner up position being split evenly between Sayvd and Minipots, both showing how awesome a product can be built in just slightly over 48 hours. The company that was given a fast track to an upcoming Seedcamp event was Business Semantics, which worked on a project to help alleviate the burden of legal document review.

Business Semantics

Using semantically-rich terminological dictionaries/ontologies and linguistic analysis to identify and remove ambiguities in contracts which by their nature constitute litigation risk.

HolyLight A CRM solution for churches to manage churchgoers + mobile & social app to allow anyone to donate anywhere via PayPal.

MiniPots Are creating a casual social game to help friends bet each other about the topics they care about.

Sayvd Sayvd is a social mobile app giving you an easy way to save small amounts of money and stick your savings in a safe place for bigger purchases later. Save 2,5 on a coffee towards your snowboard.

What’s clear after the Seedhack FinTech event however, is how much innovation still needs to happen in the space. Many of the conversations that the attendees had with each other as well as during customer validation calls circled around a huge dissatisfaction with current payment systems, credit card processing systems, security, and even banking. We truly hope to see much more innovation coming out of this space!

Do you want to work at Seedcamp? We are looking for interns to join our team for spring and summer!

We are looking for a self-starting full time intern who can tackle some of our internal projects and assist the Seedcamp team with operations. The intern will work very closely with the whole Seedcamp team and portfolio companies, on a number of interesting projects and events.

We believe the contacts and experience you’ll gain here will be instrumental in starting your own company, getting into venture capital, or staying with us longer term. This is also a unique opportunity for a more experienced person to break into the European and London startup scene – a great basis to start a new company from or join one of our portfolio companies.

The position is full time, paid, and during the duration of the internship, you will be based at our new office at CampusLondon in Shoreditch.

We want to find a candidate to start as soon as possible and are expecting you to stay with us for at least 4 months.

You are:

Your responsibilities will include:

Office

Technology

Events

Skills we are looking for:

Basic

What will set you apart:

APPLY NOW – using this form – Deadline is April 20, 2012. 

About Seedcamp:

Seedcamp is Europe’s premier seed stage investment and mentoring program, engaging ambitious startups through its program of monthly Seedcamp events in over 10 cities annually from New York to Tel Aviv. At each Seedcamp, entrepreneurs present their companies, receive world-class mentoring, network and compete for investment by Seedcamp which entitles companies to access to Seedcamp’s worldwide network of over 2,000 mentors and top-tier investors as well as participation in Seedcamp’s unique week of intensive mentoring in London and once in a lifetime month long US road trip taking in NYC, Boston, Seattle, LA, the Bay Area and SxSW.

Seedcamp has invested in companies including Moblix, Erply, Transferwise, GradCad (Estonia), Zemanta (Slovenia), Basekit (UK), Ubervu & Brainient (Romania), Vox.io and Farmeron (Croatia). Seedcamp is backed by some Europe’s top VCs & angels and works closely with Amazon, Google, Facebook, PayPal, Microsoft and Qualcomm among others to give founders the best start in life – outside Silicon Valley. Overall, Seedcamp invested in more than 60 companies this way. The standard investment is 50,000 Euros in return for a 8-10 percent stake in the business. Seedcamp is backed by more than 30 of the best European tech investors, including Index Ventures, Eden Ventures, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, and many of Europe’s most active angel investors.

Are you an early stage founder in Berlin? Do you know someone who is?

We are coming back to Berlin with Seedcamp on May 15, and the application period for the event is running until April 25th. Next Tuesday, Philipp will be in Berlin to chat to founders about Seedcamp, meet some fellow investors, mentors, and answer all questions you have.

Come by if you:

Let us know you will be there by filling in this short form.

We are planning the event to be very casual and open. Thanks to our Investor BDMI for supporting us with space and some drinks!

Location: Unter den Linden 1, Berlin-Mitte

Time & Date: 18:00-21:00, April 10, 2012