Berlin is certainly one of the hottest centers for entrepreneurship in Europe right now. And at Seedcamp we have a long history of being part of the Berlin ecosystem. From backing new startups to having Germany based investors in Seedcamp itself our roots run deep in Berlin and Germany. This year we were all the more excited therefore to be hosted by BDMI, one of our key investors. We had the whole building to ourselves, a luxury we generally don’t have and we think all the startups and mentors made full and good use of it.
One of the standout aspects, covered well by Silicon Allee, of this year’s Seedcamp was that teams literally came from all over Europe and particularly from Eastern Europe. 
There was a real sense of feeling that as welcoming as London is to startups far and wide, Berlin is building itself in the same way. We hope indeed that in meeting the awesome local mentors, startups were inspired to perhaps move to Berlin to kick off their businesses. As usual we had a stellar mentor attendance from Germany, UK, France, Nordics, and beyond. Many of the local mentors commented on being happy to have met so many foreign companies all at 1 event. As well everyone commented on the high quality of the startups and their pitches.
After the lightning fast 3-min presentations were done we had a candid and educational panel with the early investor, lawyer, and founder of Daily Deal. We always aspire to have this intimate and candid of a talk as it benefits the startups in the audience the most and we most certainly weren’t disappointed in this case. We then moved on to the mentoring sessions, which were abuzz, and mentors feedback was especially positive on the final 2 sessions being wildcard sessions. Both teams and mentors found a lot of value out of the day and a lot of follow-up meetings set. The day didn’t end there as we had the live band Pickers playing in the upstairs bar and a bit of food to nourish us after a hard day’s work. The band was awesome and rumour has it the party didn’t end till around midnight! Having the event end-to-end in one place really made Seedcamp Berlin all the more special and fun to put together. We just hope our hosts at BDMI will have us back 🙂
The winners
We’ve always been a huge fan of Dave McClure and 500 Startups and formalized our working together at Seedcamp Week last year were we announced our partnership. We already knew each other well having jointly invested in ERPLY, Brainient and LOOKK, since then we’ve teamed up on; Bluefields, Fameron and Rentlord. This has been fantastic for the teams, giving them the opportunity to explore the US market simultaneously with Europe getting the best of both worlds.
At Seedcamp Berlin we took it one step further and jointly invested in two teams at the event itself. This catapults them to a whole new level in very short space of time, they can now benefit from having both Seedcamp’s nextwork, support, and programme plus all the benefits that come with being a 500 Startup team in the US, truly invaluable as Andrew Crump CEO of Bluefields discribes here.
So without further ado the two awesome winners are:
- Repairy, Riga, Latvia
The team realized that the automotive industry is lacking simple cloud-based management system for small and medium automotive repair shops so they decided to build Repairy. A tool that allows fast processing of any incoming requests by phone and email, like registering contacts and vehicles, booking service works, ordering spare parts in one page.
- Trait Perception, Madrid – Spain
Related articles
- Back to Berlin – 15th May (seedcamp.com)
- Seedcamp Berlin Office Hours (seedcamp.com)
- Seedcamp Berlin – Mentors, office hours – Deadline April 25 (seedcamp.com)
- Meet the Teams – Seedcamp Berlin (seedcamp.com)