One of the highlights during our EU-Startups Conference last week in Berlin was clearly the pitch competition. Overall, more than 50 startups applied to participate. 15 of them were selected and 14 showed up last Friday (in total we counted ~120 attendees). It was a great mixture of exciting business models and ambitious startup teams out of 8 different European countries.
In the end, it were two female entrepreneurs (twins) from Poland who took home the prize package containing $1.500 in credits for Amazon Web Services, €600 in credits for the EU-Startups job board and €500 in credits for a design contest on 99designs. Once again: Congratulations to Katarzyna and Magdalena Biesialska!
Their startup, FestBlast, makes music festivals a hassle-free experience. By offering a one-stop tech solution to the festival organizers, FestBlast ensures the festival-goers have a seamless experience before, during and after the festival. For festival-goers, FestBlast is an all-in-one social platform that lets them easily find the best music fests, organize their trips and personalize their festival experience.
The Warsaw-based startup will generate revenues through commissions on tickets and travel, by offering festival organizers their contactless solutions, and through an analytics offering – since FestBlast can leverage the huge potential of their growing amount of festival related data. FestBlast launched in March 2015 and is already working with a growing number of festivals.
Long story short: FestBlast is tackling a huge market with a promising business model and an innovative mobile solution. Plus: They delivered a very good pitch! This combination of all then led to the jury decision in favour of FestBlast.
The jury consisted of the investors Videsha Kunkulagunta (Redstone Digital), Nicolas Sharp (Passion Capital) and David Rosskamp (formerly Earlybird – now setting up a new technology fund). According to the jury, it was a tough decision, since there were many other strong startups that took part in the competition.
The other participating startups were: Mr. Jeff, 3DQR, Hobtime, Shipwise, Draem, TripSnapp, Beemgee, Utocat, Saffe Payments, Kwikdroid, Mainlaws, Getaway and Funderbeam. A big “Thank You” to all participants. You were awesome!
