At the beginning of this week, the beautiful city of Budapest hosted another CEE Women Startup Competition, which we attended.
How can we describe it? Amazing teams, good presentations by ambitious and intelligent young entrepreneurs, cool venue (Prezi House of Ideas), lots of enthusiasm and spirit, and tough questions from the jury.
The main goal of the competition is to increase awareness of female entrepreneurship in the CEE region by collecting the most outstanding female startups of the region. The competition aims to be a source of inspiration for women, by providing opportunity year on year to the best teams, so that they may present their projects in front of potential investors. The conditions to apply include professional criteria, as well as for each team to be least 50% women.
So without further ado, let’s see this year’s winners of the pitch competition (Update – July 2023: The startups seems to be no longer in business under these websites, and we therefore deactivated the original links):
1. Gubbio (Hungary) – This is a customizable mobile app for children and their family living with autism. It supports understanding, and setting up daily agendas, as well as helps parents with sending reminders and collects data for further processing.
2. Comfee (Estonia) – This smart device retrofits ordinary window blinds to save time and energy. The solar-powered, removable device clips onto existing blinds and automatically adjusts the position of slats according to the room temperature, lighting conditions, changing weather and time of day. Comfe graduated from the Tartu-based hardware accelerator BuildIt (who we already wrote about). Comfee is the first project to get funding of €50K, and are still looking for €100K.
3. Key2Office (Austria) – This is a transparent B2B marketplace for finding and sharing space to meet and work in Europe. The idea came after noticing the need for flexible working and meeting spaces, on the other side of the empty office spaces.
“While in Europe, the ratio of female founded startups are below 21%, we feel that there is a need to inspire, educate and unite them whenever we can. CEE Women Startup Competition is an excellent place for that”, said Támas Muller, founder of the contest.
In case you’d like to check out the event online, the hashtag on Twitter was #ceews. Another 9 projects made it to the final, which you can also check out here.
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