Pitch well, and you’ll be invited to Monaco


writer icon Brooke Illummont     Alice Mangé   |   Startups     🕐 27. Feb. 2018

On Wednesday the exclusive fundraising network, VROOM, started their European tour of discovering talented startups. 11 Danish startups had been carefully selected by the Vroom team and their now Danish partner Accelerace.

Why Denmark?
Having previously met startups from the Netherlands, Coordinator at Vroom Mila Mihaylova, considered that there might be similarities between the startups from the Netherland and Denmark, due to the countries similarity in size. As well as the fact that a number of great startups had come out of Denmark. She explained: “It seems like there is a lot of potential startups, that could align with what we are looking for. Even in specific areas such as AI, FinTech and definitely Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies”.

Symbion and Accelerace are VROOM’s partners in Denmark. Based out of Copenhagen, Symbion is Denmark’s largest startup environment consisting of more than 475 innovative companies. And Accelerace is one of the world’s top 10 seed-accelerators. Since 2008 Accelerace has spotted, trained and invested in more than 500 of the most promising Danish and international startups and growth companies. 88% of the companies are still on the market today.
So it might not have been a complete coincidence that VROOM picked Symbion and Accelerace to collaborate with.

Who was there?
Skidos, Unleash, Coinify CrediWire, Justt, CodersTrust where all part of the morning session, pitching in front of a panel of international business people and investors from, France, Denmark and the Vroom representative.

After lunch, the panel was exchanged with a bunch of new fresh investors. The day then continued with pitched from Ideanote, Botsupply, Grazper, Lendino and Actimo.

How did the startups do?
The Vroom represents and the investors seem to be impressed with the pitched. But some were without a doubt better than others.

For most of the startups this was their second round of investment they were going for. But one could be fooled. Some of them failed miserably, in their 30 min of pitching, at getting their business idea across, and had to use all their allocated question time trying to once again explain what their business was. And others sailed through the pitching as pushing all the right buttons to make the investors intrigued.

In the mingling hours after a full day of listening to startups pitch, investors where in font terms discussing how relaxed all of the pitching style of the startups were “real Scandinavian style”.

The challenges of pricing and evaluation a startup
"The startups are asking for way too little. Scandinavians always do that!" Said a participant in the event. And went on to explain that, it will take a startup around six months before you get the money, and then a year from now the startups will in most cases have spent all the money and will have to start preparing for their second or third round of investment.

A full day
A full day of startups pitching in front of two international panels of investors had passed and it was clear that although nearly all of them made mistakes the pitches were overall good.

Peter B. Madsen one of the representatives from VROOM, said "The quality of companies here [in Denmark] is probably one of the best”. and explained further that they were hoping to find startups that were ready to go outside expand outside the Denmark Market.

Both the two panels had evaluated each startup and Coinify had been selected to come to be the Danish representative at the VRROM Summit in Monaco on October 5, 2018 at the VROOM Summit.



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