In 2013, we are holding four full blown Seedcamp Weeks which will give founders across Europe the biggest possible exposure, high quality mentoring, and the possibility to join the Seedcamp Family.
Seedcamp Week Berlin is next on the schedule, and in less than a month some of Europe’s best Entrepreneurs, Operators, and Investors will join us for a week of events in Germany’s Capital. We have some great mentors and investors signed up – as you could see on Twitter today, they’re looking forward to meeting some great startups from across Europe.
Mentoring day, taking place at The Factory, will include Entrepreneurs, Product and Marketing experts, and some of the best operators across the German and European startup scene. Some of the people included are Christian Hernandez, David Noel, Jason Goodman, Paul Jozefak and Christian Thaler-Wolski – these are mentors the Seedcamp teams have consistently rated extremely high, and thus we are happy to have them on board again.
Seedcamp Week will also include a Demo Day taking place at BDMI, where we will showcase the best teams we saw at Seedcamp Berlin, and some of our earlier Seedcamp teams who are currently fundraising. For investors, this is a great way to catch up on the progress of teams they already know, and to meet new teams from Seedcamp Week Berlin. The top investments funds will be represented and we already have great names signed up to attend including investors from Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital, Balderton Capital, BDMI, Earlybird, DFJ Esprit and T-Venture (Investors: let us know if you are interested to take part).
The selected startups will already meet the Seedcamp Team on Sunday to get prepared and ready for the week at The Wye. Monday will see investment interviews, during which the participating teams will pitch to the Seedcamp Team and investors for inclusion in the year long Seedcamp Program.
In the past and coming weeks, Mini Seedcamps are happening all across Europe – from Belgrade to Tel Aviv, from Istanbul to Amsterdam, and in Kiev and Stockholm. Out of these local events, we will invite teams to participate in Seedcamp Week Berlin. Mini Seedcamps are a new and exciting way for us to travel to local entrepreneurship and startup hubs and meet lots of companies close to home. We bring along some of our teams who share their Seedcamp experience, and engage with the local mentor and investment community to increase visibility and access for the teams taking part.
Startups can also apply directly to Berlin and get selected through the traditional application process – if you already know about Seedcamp and know what to expect, this is a straightforward way to engage. You can apply now and work on your application until the deadline on Sunday 21st, midnight.
We are very thankful for the Seedcamp Sponsors; Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Qualcomm Ventures and PayPal Developer and our Event Partner in Berlin, BDMI, who make this event possible. Without them, Seedcamp couldn’t travel the globe and do all that we do for entrepreneurs. We would also like to thank our venue hosts in Berlin; The Wye, The Factory and BDMI.
Campus is celebrating its one year anniversary and the celebrations will be ongoing throughout the whole of April. As part of the celebrations all Campus Partners will be organizing events to showcase their work for those in and around London who still don’t know what happens at 4-5 Bonhill Street or who are curious to learn more.
We’re very proud to call Campus home and are eager to show the wider startup community who we are and what we’re up to. On the 18th of April, Seedcamp is taking part in the many activities included in the celebrations and we’re bringing a taste of our bread and butter to residents and the wider startup community, with SeedPeek.
First up, Carlos Espinal, Seedcamp Partner, will have an informal chat with the founders of two Seedcamp teams that climbed their way to Seedcamp HQ on Campus’ fourth floor. Subscrib and Planvine, both startups were “Made in Campus” and grow from the ecosystem that is being built here. Subscrib’s founders met at Central Working in the basement back in September and Planvine moved to Techhub the day that Campus opened. Both these teams joined the Seedcamp family after winning Seedcamp Week London back in January and they’ll be sharing their stories and experiences.
After that we’ll be hearing from another success story, this time an outcome from our other endeavours at Campus: Seedhack. The winners of the last edition of our very own hackathon, Relist, will be here to talk about how they went from a weekend of full-on coding and brainstorming at Seedhack, to an actual startup. They still work downstairs at Central Working everyday. Since they got a wildcard at Seedhack for our next Seedcamp Week in Berlin they now eager to show us their progress and how they’ve evolved.
Finally we’ll be joined by the founders of a company that went through the Seedcamp program back in Seedcamp’s first years. They’ll be able to share their success story and how Seedcamp was a key stepping stone in their journey to success.
This is a guest post written by Alex Covic for start·it, our Media Partner for Mini Seedcamp Belgrade on the 5th of April.
In case you’ve missed the news, the inaugural Mini Seedcamp Belgrade will take place at a very special venue – the Royal Palace, on April the 5th. The event will coincide with the biggest startup event of the season, the Startup Standup event which takes place day later, on the 6th.
Seedcamp is almost unanimously recognized as the most important seed fund in Europe, and event in Belgrade will be held in the revamped, “Mini Seedcamp” format, in partnership with SEE ICT and Startit.
Belgrade is the first stop in their 2013 European tour, and we are positive that Seedcamp’s visit will have a big impact and help to further ignite the Serbian startup community – which is definitely gathering momentum and picking up pace.
Startup Standup will also double as the Demo Day & Graduation event of the first class of Startup Academy – a majority of which have also been selected to pitch at the Mini Seedcamp. This is a unique opportunity for young entrepreneurs and founders from the locale (and a few other places, more on that below) to get some invaluable feedback from Seedcamp’s mentors and investors.
Hopefully, some of them will also get invited to the Seedcamp Week in Berlin, where they will get a shot at the big prize – the acceptance into Seedcamp’s prestigious programme, an an initial seed investment of up to 50.000€.
A total of nine startups will pitch at the event – seven from Serbia, and one each from Croatia and Romania.
The first Mini Seedcamp in Serbia is organised in partnership with SEE ICT with the support of Crown Prince Alexander II Foundation for Education.
For fresh updates regarding SEE tech startups follow Start·it on Twitter.
Planvine pitching Andreessen Horowitz
After our whistle-stop tour of the startup ecosystem on the East coast of the US, the teams flew West for seven more action-packed days including two more mentoring days in Mountain View at Google and in San Francisco at Microsoft.
For the third, and final, leg of the trip we were in San Francisco and Silicon Valley where the teams visited great startups such as Airbnb, AngelList, Dropbox, SoundCloud, Square, Stripe and Twitter along with more established companies such as Amazon A9.com, Facebook, Google, IDEO, Microsoft and Paypal.
There was also plenty of pitching to be done, with the teams presenting their companies to great investors including 500 Startups, AME Cloud Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Morado Venture Partners, NEA, OATV, SoftTechVC and Valar Ventures.
After seven days in California the official part of the Seedcamp US trip came to an end, with teams returning to London, staying in the US to follow up with people they met or traveling to Austin for SXSW Interactive.
Take a look at the daily recaps of the third part of the trip, in San Francisco and Silicon Valley:
Also check out our previous two blog posts, recapping the trip in New York and Boston:
Interested in joining the Seedcamp family and taking part in our next US trip later in the year? Apply to one of our upcoming Mini Seedcamps or apply directly to Seedcamp Berlin.
Seedcamp Boston Mentoring Day
After a busy few days in New York, the teams headed to Boston to learn more about the local startup scene and to take part in the second mentoring day of the US trip, held at hack/reduce.
On our first day in Boston, we paid visits to thoughtbot, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), Boundless Learning and RunKeeper. We also met with a Seedcamp team that had recently opened an office in Boston, uberVU, who had put together a great panel who discussed moving to the US. On the second day, we held our second mentoring day of the trip at hack/reduce. We were joined by great mentors from the Boston startup scene and top investors from all the top local funds. After the mentoring ended, we were privileged to have been invited to the ‘Built in Boston: An Open Ecosystem Event for Founders’ with great speakers such as Fred Destin (Atlas Venture), Rob Go (Next View Ventures), Robin Chase (Founder, Zipcar, Buzzcar) and Dharmesh Shah (Founder, Hubspot).
You can follow all the action live on our Tumblr blog: http://seedcamp.tumblr.com/
We will be posting daily recaps of the previous day’s events, take a look at our time in Boston here:
Week 2 in Boston:
Fred Wilson and Andy Weissman from Union Square Ventures meet the Seedcamp teams in New York
The Seedcamp US trip 2013 kicked off last week with three busy days in New York including visits to companies such as General Assembly, Spotify, Tumblr, 10gen, Foursquare and betaworks and investors such as IA Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Lerer Ventures. We also held the first mentoring day of the US trip at Google Chelsea Market with many top mentors coming to hear what the teams are building and to give them advice.
You can follow all the action live on our Tumblr blog: http://seedcamp.tumblr.com/
We will be posting daily recaps of the previous day’s events, take a look at our first week here:
Week 1 in New York
This weekend, over 100 hackers came down to Campus in London for Seedhack with only one goal; to disrupt fashion and online retail. After a long weekend of prototyping, building, presenting (and getting through a fridge full of Red Bull and a huge stack of pizzas); twenty one new startups came to life.
We would like to thank our sponsors who made the event possible: HarperCollins, Net-A-Porter, M&S, Domain.Me and the Seedcamp sponsors supporting this event: PayPal and Yammer. We would also like to thank Rackspace for sponsoring the drinks on Thursday.
Friday kicked off with three great keynote speeches from Nick Perrett (Group Director, Strategy and Digital at HarperCollins Publishers), Nick Cust (Director of ECommerce at NET-A-PORTER.COM) and Devin Hunt (CPO / cofounder at Lyst) who provided a lot of inspiration to the participants. They were followed by API speakers from HarperCollins, ASOS, Google, Net-A-Porter, Imagga and Paypal who explained how their technology could be used in the projects (most of the final projects included at least one of the technologies presented) and an introduction to Lean Canvas by Jon Gold.
The queue to pitch ideas stretched to the back of the room, quickly teams were formed and the real work could begin. After working late into the night on Friday, the teams were back in action early in the morning on Saturday with some even running to Oxford Street to talk to customers to validate their ideas from the night before. Saturday afternoon brought another great set of mentors to Campus which helped the teams with their business and API questions. After another late night, Sunday was spent putting the final touches on the products and presentations and, by 3pm, 21 new startups had been formed; a record number for Seedhack.
The judges were very impressed by the quality of the projects and how much had been achieved in such a short time but were given the difficult task of selecting an overall winner and four runners-up. We would like to thank the judges: Carlos E. Espinal, Tom Montgomery, Jon Gold, Johanna Kollmann and Simon Cast.
Each member of the winning team received an awesome prize, but we were so impressed that we also extended an invitation to attend Seedcamp Berlin in May to the winner.
Please check out the winners and the great projects they built during the weekend:
Relist – The global marketplace of excess luxury fashion for both off-price (professional) fashion buyers and boutiques/designers.
Team: Sara Gordon, Ivan Mazour, Gianluca Trombetta, Manu Matute and Laurence Greenberg.
Checkout Anywhere – Affiliate platform for publishers to sell products featured within editorial content using responsive checkout widgets.
Team: Harpal Singh, Robert Franks and Jun Seki
Fashion Intern – A Facebook game to crowdsource fashion metadata.
Team: Ben Dixon, Travis Street, Huw Walters, Rachel Cosford and Christiaan Hendriksen
Colourtag Me – Use colour analysis to find clothes that will suit.
Team: Jessica Healy, Alastair Lee, Barry Macmahon, Mart Karu and Kaido Treial.
Chip-in.me – Helps co-ordinate group purchases.
Team: Maxim Cramer, Sara Gozalo and Alex Powell
Check out some great photos from the event:
And a short video:
A huge thanks again to everyone who participated this weekend, we are already looking forward to the next edition of Seedhack which is planned for later this year.
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