One of the highlights during our EU-Startups Conference last week in Berlin was clearly our big pitch competition. Overall, more than 140 startups applied to participate. 15 of them made it to the finals and pitched in front of an expert jury and our roughly 360 attendees. At this year’s pitch competition we had a great mixture of exciting business models and ambitious startup teams out of 9 different European countries!
In the end, it was the Berlin-based FinTech startup B2B Pay which won the competition and took home the prize package worth €17,500.
The package includes prizes/credits from cloud technology provider Aruba Cloud (value: €9,000), the email service SendGrid (value: €2,950), the CRM, project management & invoicing solution Teamleader (value: €3,600), the design marketplace 99designs (value: €1,000) and our Job Board (value: €950).
B2B Pay is a German/Finnish startup which offers virtual bank accounts for companies that export into Europe or export from Europe to the rest of the world. The mission of B2B Pay is to make international business transactions as quick and as cheap as possible with complete transparency about costs. B2B Pay simplifies the bureaucratic process and eliminates the need for back and forth paperwork.
Long story short: B2B Pay is tackling a huge market with a promising business model and the company’s CEO delivered a very good pitch! This combination then led to the jury decision in favour of B2B Pay.
The expert jury consisted of Alexander Kölpin (WestTech Ventures), Robin Dechant (Point Nine Capital) and Thomas P. Offner (PwC). According to the jury, it was a tough decision, since there were many other strong startups that took part in the competition.
Once again: Congratulations to the B2B Pay team and to the startup’s CEO Neil Ambikar who represented the company on stage! And last but not least: A big “Thank You” to all participants of this year’s EU-Startups Conference. You were awesome!
