Six young companies met an audience of nearly 200 startup enthusiasts, including 30 top investors, at THINK Demo Day, writes 8till5. A panel with top Nordic investors and presentations from the six startups in THINK Accelerate autumn program were the highlights of this end-of-year event in Helsingborg last Thursday.
“Demo Day is about more than just pitches from our startups. It is also an opportunity to gather the startup world and learn from each other,” says Johannes Ivarsson, Accelerator Manager at Think Accelerate.
The event gathered around 30 business angels and representatives from venture capital firms. Four top Nordic investors participated in a panel discussion where they explained important aspects they look for when investing in a company.
“When we invest in the early stages, the team is the focus. A good team can get almost any business whatsoever to fly and a bad team can fail even with the best business idea,” says Ekaterina Gianelli from the Finnish venture capital company, Inventure.
Sofia, YOU++, Cirons, LeanLaw, Upbis and Quickbutik are the six startups in the accelerator’s autumn batch which presented their business ideas. Daniel Eklöf and his team at LeanLaw, a legal support service for e-commerce businesses, are seeking an investment of 400 000 dollars (around € 380k) to recruit developers and finance the next one and a half years. The situation is similar for the other startups soon “graduating” from the accelerator as they look forward to continue their growth and development.
“We would be very happy if we could get into an investment that helps us run the company for the next six months and hire more people in Skåne,” says Jonas Jonasson, founder of Cirons, an innovative Resource Intelligence (RI) system.
Both Eklöf and Jonasson expressed their satisfaction with their experience in the accelerator, as well as with the mentors and advisers they got to meet. So far this year, over 40 companies have been part of THINK’s programs and have received a total of 1.2 million dollars in external capital. THINK, formerly an incubator, was reorganized last April into an accelerator to speed up the development process for startups and is already accepting applications for their 2016 spring batch.
