Today, we’ve closed our latest Seedcamp Week with a bang – another 4 investments for Seedcamp in 2011, and of course the winners of our first Seedcamp Week competition.
4 new Seedcamp Teams
While most of the teams (16 of 20) were already Seedcamp Winners of Mini Seedcamp events, 4 teams (Appextras, Blossom.io, Crowd, and Rentlord) were in London this week to convince us to make them part of the family. With to-the-point pitches and well-ran mentoring sessions they did just that, so we decided: All four of them are now Seedcamp companies:
- Appextras from Canada / Brazil (Mini Seedcamp NY) – adding an app store to every app to increase downloads and enable publishers to cross-promote apps
- Blossom from Austria (Mini Seedcamp London Ljubljana) – a project management system that allows development teams to use the lean startup methodology in a smarter way
- Crowd from France (Mini Seedcamp London August) – aggregating photos from different photo sharing applications to enable teleportation and simple content aggregation
- Rentlord from UK (Mini Seedcamp NY) – one network, one platform, to disrupt the real estate renting market – because “renting is broken”
The Seedcamp Week Competition and an unlikely surprise
Since the other teams were not competing for investment as in previous Seedcamp Weeks, we had decided before the week to introduce a competition: a total of 50.000 Euros in splits of 25, 15, and 10 thousand Euros would be offered as an investment prize for the best team of Seedcamp Week, as voted by mentors, investors, and the teams themselves.
The most liked company was GrabCAD, started in Estonia and now based in Boston, who have joined Seedcamp January of this year. GrabCAD has since moved to Boston, participated in Techstars, and raised a round from awesome investors like Atlas Ventures, Matrix Partners, and Highline Ventures. When Hardi, the CEO of GrabCAD heard he was selected for the top prize, he decided to do what lots of mentors and investors had done to help him move his business forward: GrabCAD gave up the first price and decided to let FarmerOn, one of the newest additions to the Seedcamp Teams, take the stage for it. A truly inspiring story, which was highly appreciated by everyone in attendance. In his own words: “So many people have helped and shared with us at GrabCAD, so it’s time to give a little bit back: We’ve raised a lot of money already, and I am sure FarmerOn can put the prize to great use”.
The second and third prize went to Vox.io, who recently moved their team to San Francisco to disrupt the Telco market, and TransferWise, who are building an ingenious solution for peer to peer currency exchange.
A generous offer by the Seedcamp Founder Investors
Saul and Robin Klein are not only the founder and founding investor of Seedcamp through The Accelerator Group, but of course our greatest supporters as Chairman and mentor at almost all Seedcamp Events. The Accelerator Group is also one of the most prolific investors in post-Seedcamp companies, having invested in Seedcamp companies of all previous years, and supporting them on the journey to build world beating companies (Robin and Saul Klein are investors in ERPLY, Zemanta, EDITD, and others). This year, they decided to step it up another notch and have offered a number Seedcamp companies of the current batch an investment right out of Seedcamp Week.