EBAN and SEP: Building a Partnership (Website)

You may have caught our recent announcement at the Mobile World Congress’ 4YFN event — Startup Europe Partnership (SEP), on behalf of Mind the Bridge, has partnered up with EBAN to help promote the growth of startup and scaleups across Europe, and the world.

On February the 24th , EBAN and MTB held their first joint initiative, a SEP Matching and Mentoring event in Barcelona at the Open Future Telefonica venue. The event was supported by the Business Angels Network de Catalunya (BANC) and also two local Barcelona universities IESE and ESADE, as well as Spanish batch of Keiretsu forum, one of the largest global network of angel investors. All four organizations share our goal to support the growth of entrepreneurship.

BANC’s president Albert Colomer opened the day with a welcome speech, followed by Ignacio Puente, Invest Horizon’s Program Officer, and Valentin Fernandez, Wayra’s Investment Director.

The 22 participating startups (beating out 50+ other SEP’s applicants), have received support from 16 high-profile mentors and over 70 investors. During the morning the startups were split into 4 roundtables based on industry vertical and stage of development, and then proceeded with their presentations. Each of the startups had the opportunity to meet a carefully selected group of investors and to receive feedback on their business plan.

The participants were asked to listen and evaluate all 22 startups that presented their disrupting technology and products operating across an array of different industries — ranging from from biotech to advertising to computer vision analysis.

Ultimately, 4 stood out of the crowd:

– Pupilium:  e-learning platform for doctors

– Photoniktech: develop competitive cameras that enable 3-Dimensional pictures on smartphones, tablets, laptops, notebooks and All-In-One displays

– Made of Genes: a high performing computational platform dedicated to improving your health and wellness through informed personal genomics

– Incubaaps : an application development platform in the Cloud, helping unskilled users to create, launch and manage mobile utility apps, connected to IoT, easily and effortless.

We’re thrilled our first joint initiative with EBAN was a resound success. But the fun doesn’t end here!

Stay tuned for more details on our SEP Matching event at EBAN’s Annual conference at Porto in May.