Tommy has been one of the most active tech angels in the region. With a past at Podio and ZYB, he has also been involved in GameAnalytics, Drivr, Astralis, Vivino, Peakon and many more. He has been a vocal angel, and one of the investors that is often in the spotlight. A spokesperson for tech opinions and entrepreneurship in Denmark.

He will take over the role as minister after Søren Pind.

“I wish we could have met under other circumstances. As a citizen and entrepreneur, I have always been wildly impressed with you. You are prepared to discuss ethics and morals and allow it to be ruler of policy. I have the deepest respect for that” said Tommy Ahlers to his predecessor.

Regarding his investments and future investements, he announced at the pressconference that he will step down as active investor, and become passive in the ones he has.

“The companies in which I have active investments I will change to passive ownership. The passive investments I have, will be administrated by an executive, so that there are no conflict of interest.”

The post Top angel investor becomes minister appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Drivr has since its beta launch in 2013 offered software for customers, drivers and administration in the industry of licensed on demand transportation. The Drivr app has made it possible for customers to easily find and order taxies in their vicinity. Drivr additionally offers easy in-app payment, a navigation system that directs drivers towards the highest demand and easy management of expenses for administration. With these features, the company has quickly become the leading provider of cloud-based technology for taxi and other licensed on demand drivers.

Improving the existing infrastructure

Instead of offering an alternative to the traditional taxi, Drivr seeks to innovate the way we interact with the already existing infrastructure. The taxi industry has been through a turbulence for the last couple of years. This has led to an increased demand for accessibility, service and consistency in the industry. Drivr supplies licensed drivers with a technology that will give them a competitive edge in a fast changing environment.

The rapid success of the company has attracted the attention of The Danish Growth Fund. The Danish Growth Fund is a state investment fund that focuses on financing growth in small and medium-sized enterprises. The fund has chosen to invest €3 million in the Drivr, shared in the company’s blog, and have thereby led a total funding of €9 million in the company.

“We believe we can deliver a much better service by partnering with the best local operators around the world instead of working with non-licensed drivers in their own cars. We’re really excited to roll this network out at an increased pace with our new funding,” – says Søren Halskov Nissen, CEO and co-founder of Drivr.

With the new funding, Drivr will focus on broadening the implementation of their system around the world. While Drivr’s services are already used in Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and the Baltics, the company hopes to further their growth by opening two new offices in Germany and Spain.

Update: The headline initially said Drivr has raised €9 million, which reflected the total amount raised so far by the startup. We changed it to €3 million in the headline, the latest round, to be consistent with how we report on this usually. We apologise for any misunderstanding.

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The entrepreneurs participating in Geist consist of nine respected and successful startups:

• Kasper Hulthin, Podio
• Mette Lykke, Endomondo
• Michael A. Hansen, Komfo
• Martin Falslev, Trendsales
• Ken Villum Klausen, Wallmob
• Søren Halskov Nissen, drivr
• Peter Michael Oxholm Zigler, AutoButler
• Mogens Storgaard Jakobsen, Userreport
• Christian Steffensen, Kirkeweb

Together they come up with 10 recommendations to the government officials to enable a growing success of the Danish National IT and tech startups, and the result is also indirectly an evaluation of public actions aimed at entrepreneurs.

The 10 recommendations are both harsh as well as open-minded. It contains some solid tips such as #1 “remove the brand”, which emphasises that public run initiatives are looked down upon in the community, and it might be better to ‘hide’ that they are government run, and put entrepreneurs in the front. Other advices are such as #5 “Join us!”, that the public officials need to be present at meet ups and co-working spaces, and should not expect entrepreneurs to come to them if they want help. They need to build a relationship with them.

It also contains some more controversial, such as #3 “spoil the elite”, which argues that by helping the ones with the largest ambitions thru special services will enable better business development, instead of treating a freelancer in the same way as a ‘born global’ startup.

You can find all 10 advices here.

Update: Due to popular demand we have translated the rules to English. They can be found here.

“Geist is public run, and there a lot of public projects launched, and Geist is a kind of evaluation of them. It is a good idea, it is thought-thru. Instead of putting officials in an office this gets a dialogue with entrepreneurs.” says Christian Steffensen from Kirkeweb to Trendsonline.

Trendsonline has a longer article with both Christian Steffensen and Søren Halskov Nissen and their thoughts.

The post Geist: Experienced entrepreneurs give 10 rules to the government appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

“The launch of Tesla as an option for a ride is a dream for us. For 12 months we have been working to launch the unique combination of environmentally friendly technology and comfort the Tesla offers, and now we are finally ready. It is hard to really comprehend. We are very happy and very proud to be the first with this!”

Says Nikolaj Køster, co-founder of drivr.

Drivr: taxi, private drivers and now also Green Cars

Having the Tesla as an option for rides is also a long term commitment from the Drivr team:

“We actually applied for licenses with our local partner to get the Tesla as a licensed limousine registered. We took the initiative and made sure it would happen.”

“We aim to do this in a larger level. We think making electric cars available, and cars of as high quality and luxury as the Tesla Model S, is an important step for the future. Besides the car is 100% green luxury, it will be run by professional drivers in a suit with a big smile and great service.”

Disrupting transportation

In a similar way to other startups such as Uber and Hailo, Drivr aims to vastly modernise ground transportation with the help of technology. They want to make it more convenient for both the driver and the passenger. However, all the companies have their own approaches.

“Unlike other startups in this area, our background with a vast network of cities worldwide and collaborations with taxi companies, gives us a great position to expand this service.”

Drivr, having started under the name Click A Taxi and as a taxi aggregation service, has given the startup a different business model then it’s main competitor, Uber.

“In our first iteration we could set up a new city in under 30 minutes. Right now we have a deeper integration, taking longer, but we aim to build up further on those initial experience and contacts.”

A different approach then Uber

On what differs Drivr to Uber the biggest player in this field, Nikolaj explains:

“We have a different approach to business then Uber. We partner up with local companies, and help them. Uber instead battles the local companies and sets up its own taxi operations. “

He also explains that they see themselves as a SaaS for the taxi industry, instead of a competitor. Their system with payment and bookings over the app is a smoother and far more efficient service then current technology used by Taxi companies.

“We now act more as a global credit card provider. Because we have such a high volume of transactions compared to a taxi company, we can offer them lower rates on their credit card processing fees. Our software makes the taxi companies transition from cash to credit card a lot easier, besides bringing a lot of other benefits.”

Having starting with only taxi services and operations, and only in the last year moving into the private driver sector, Drivr has taken the opposite direction of Uber, which has recently gone further towards direct taxi services.

“In the long run however the major players will offer both services, both private drivers as well as taxis. It’s about giving consumers the choice to get a ride from A to B, at all price points.”

There is certainly a lot happening in this space at the moment. However, when asked how he sees the competition, Nikolaj is relaxed:

“There is a lot of disruption going on, and there certainly is one big player in the school yard. But for us the main thing is to make a great product and make the world of transport a bit better. It’s a fun thing to build, and it’s very satisfying to enable better transportation and better service level to the public.”

We look forward to more green rides and in a lot more cities in the future!

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From the Øresund region winners where:

• Airhelp won the Startup of the year Award for the Danish part of the competition.
• Airtame, who won the Best Newcomer award in the Danish part
• Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship, who won the Best Service Provider award of the Danish part.
• Dimitrij Aleshkov, who won the Developer Hero award for the Swedish part.
• Jesper Buch, won the Best Investor award of the Danish part
• Søren Halskov Nissen, co-founder of Drivr, won the Founder of the Year of the Danish part

Unfortunatly at the grand finale none from this region won the Nordic prize. If you want to know more about the winners in Olso, check out BBCs article about it.

Great work by everyone – congratulations to the awards!

The post Winners from the Nordic Startup Awards appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Also new is the option for premium cars. In similarity with Uber and other services, it is now possible to book a more exclusive car instead of just a normal Taxi.

“We are introducing for the first time in Denmark a ‘flat rate’ and pay via the app. If you are going to the airport in Copenhagen, you can now get a fixed price before the trip starts by putting the airport as your destination.” says co-founder Søren Halskov Nissen to Trendsonline.

A lot bigger then Uber

Drivr is currently active in 50 countries, over 5000 cities and have over 300 000 cars available world-wide. This makes them on of the biggest “taxi app” startups. Also very interesting is how they compare to Uber, who have gotten a lot of startup attention and funding, recently from Google Ventures. Uber currently only has 21 cities, although all of them are major cities the difference is still huge!

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It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

• Billetto
• Miinto
• Vivino
• WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
• Zmags

B2B

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

The post Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Until now, Click A Taxi users are only able to book taxi through the app, which has been a big improvement, but now the possibilities are even more.

Today one can only pay for the taxi rides with either credit card or cash and one has to even save paper receipts. Click A Taxi is making the changes rapidly. Moving forward, as a taxi customer of Amager-Øbro Taxi, one can be able to pay automatically from the app and also receive the receipts on the mobile phone.

“We will build the world’s best taxi service and so far we’ve made it easy to book a taxi without ringing. Our next step is to improve service levels and make payment smarter. Amager-Øbro Taxi 4×27 is a pioneer in the taxi in Denmark and will improve service and technology to the top level,”says the Director of Click A Taxi, Søren Halskov Nissen.

The evolution of Click A Taxi’s App system makes taxi customers’ life much easier and more convenient. We will thus do more follow-ups with Click A Taxi.

Click here for the original news from Trends Online.

The post Click A Taxi is ready for automatic App payment appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

The company not only expands globally but also continuously develops their services to maintain growth.

“We have also introduced a cloud-based call center in Romania, which companies can buy access to. Either we can offer the whole package and simply take over the work, or they can send their customers further if they are really busy at the office. We know it all from Copenhagen. If it suddenly starts to piss down, then headphones become overcrowded, but now companies can automatically send the waiting customers on to us. We can service them rather than to have them waiting on the phone,” explains Soren Halskov Nissen to Trendsonline.dk

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The event was marked by a great spirit and community feeling, and will probably be looked at as an important day for the Copenhagen and Denmarks startup community.

The day was filled with great advice and stories. Here is a summary of some of the things that where said and wisdom that was shared.

Opening and part 1: new startups

Opening keynote by Morten Lund, the famous investor. Morten opened with a personal and charismatic keynote. His biggest advice – “find profiten” – focus on where the money is found!

After the opening Lars Buch from Startupbootcamp MobilityXL presented 8 different up-and-coming startups: Click-a-taxi, Iconfinder, Vivino, Rushfiles, Atosho, Graduateland, Queue-it and Autouncle.
They all got 10 minutes to talk about their business, their funding and their challenges. Very interesting and fast-paced. There could be done individual blogposts for each of the presentations, but suffice to say – all of these startups are definitly worth keeping an eye on!

Part 2: startups

This part was opened by minister Morten Østergaard, who talked about the innovationstrategy. He emphasised that we have among the highest money spent on R&D in Denmark, but are mediocre at creating jobs from it. He realized the need for this to change.

After this was a long but inspiring session with alot of established startups on stage, most of whom where in an internationallization phase. Alot of great advice where given and stories told. I is not possible to get everything in one post, but here are some highlights:

Peter Mühlmann from Trustpilot talked about his rating-startup, it’s ambitions and struggles, as well as the experience of opening an New York office. Best quote:

“Starting a startup is like playing WoW – you kill monsters and collect gold”

Jens Karstoft from zmags, who also talked about their US expansion, and that moving the HQ to the US when you already had 25 employess in your HQ in Denmark was something he would not recommend others to do. Either move it when you are still alot smaller, or set up an regional office in the US instead of HQ, was his lessons to the crowd. He also talked their tougher period 2011-2012, when they hired and american CEO and raised alot of money, but i did not have the desired effect on the revenue or growth. The CEO had to go after 9 month – an expensive lesson he said.
Key points from Jens:

– “get it right” vs “grow it fast”
– don’t take chances if hiring a CEO
– the right team is everything. Focus on values!
– it’s never easy – remember to have fun

Henrik Lottrup from LanguageWire talked about their grows since they started in 2000 to todays turnover of 142 Mdkk (€19M), and their expansion to worldwide costumers and offices all over Europe.

Bengt Sundstrøm founder of Lauritz went on stage after that, talking about his journey and their marked segment. His main poits was – if you are online, focus on mobile! A whooping 42% of their bids where now placed from mobile devices!

Ditlev Bredahl from OnApp, who told his story of starting a hosting company, in times when Amazon Cloud Services grows at an anual rate of 70%. But he has managed an ambitious journey since the start of OnApp in 2011, already having 135 employees and recieved $20M in VC funding. He talked about his past at UK2group which he sold in 2011.
What we all will remember his talk for is however the unique touch of only using LEGO Star Wars pictures in the presentations – something that also made his main point quite clear: Amazon = the dark side

Thorvald Stigsen from Momondo was the last one in this session. He talked about how they have become a big player in a crowded field – travel recommendations and bookings. He talked about the start as founder in 2006 until he sold it in 2011. Main points where branding and how to position yourself as an underdog, with words of wisdom:

“Rebel is the new mainstream”

The final part: successful entrepreneurs

Mikkel Svane from Zendesk talked (via video) about their journey. He mentioned an important tip: It is difficult for US investors to do background check on foreign entrepreneurs (visit sites like https://www.sterlingcheck.co.uk/ for additional guidance). This is problematic, as investors want to make sure they know you before investing. His lesson was that is it important to build and show a good track record in order to get investments from the US.

Lars Nielsen from Sitecore presented, as the only one doing it in english, about their journey from a tool (CMS) to solving their costumers problems.
He also shared two of his greatest wisdoms:

1. people are key. When companies grow they tend to hire bosses who hire people they can control. Don’t do that. Higher people that are smarter then you, that themselves hire people who are smarter then them. Even if that turns you into the company fool
2. stick to core values (in their case – be cool, have fun )

Klaus Nyengaard from JustEat, shared amongst other things his thoughts on scaling – how to go from a small local startup to 1000+ employees and being the worlds largest direct food delivery company. A remarkable feat, especially considering that this marked segment is alot harder to scale then a software service. He also talked about his concept of entreprofessionals – the best kind of employees. As one of the main sponsors with the event he also pleased the crowd by announcing that their will be a Tech BBQ in 2014 as well!

The closing keynote was from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, from Podio, who wrapped up by an inspiring speech about how we should get this regions startup community kick-started. A perfect ending for an inspiring day.

This was a great event, that really got some of the most important players together. Even if it was noticeble that it was the first time the event was held, the keynotes and presenters are what made the day great. Good work being done by Trendsonline and Daniel Laursen.

As a final note we would like to end with Navid Ostadian Binai‘s Tweet, which is the only real thing that we definitly would like to see improved for next years Tech BBQ:

Great start to #TechBBQ, but a shame it’s in Danish. Hope it’ll be in English next year so we can attract a much more international crowd.

— Navid Ostadian-Binai (@navidob) May 7, 2013

Something that was also echoed by both Lars Buch and Lars Nielsen on stage.

Full list of startups and entrepreneurs presenting where:

1. The first part was new startups

• Click a Taxi, Søren Halskov Nissen
• Iconfinder, Martin LeBlanc
• Vivino, Heine Zachariassen
• Rushfiles, Morten Klank
• Atosho, Anders Ibsen
• Graduateland – Patrick Lund
• Queue-it – Camilla Ley Valentin
• AutoUncle – Johan Frederik Schjødt

2. Startups that have gotten a good amount of investements and some traction internationally

• TrustPilot – Peter Mühlmann
• Zmags – Jens Karstoft
• LanguageWire – Henrik Lottrup
• Lauritz.com – Bengt Sundstrøm
• OnApp – Ditlev Bredahl
• Momondo – Thorvald Stigsen

3. Success stories and veteran entrepreneurs, who told their stories and their advice to the younger people in the crowd.

• Sitecore – Lars Nielsen<
• Just-Eat – Klaus Nyengaard
• Podio – Thomas Madsen-Mygdal

If you want to read more, trendsonline has an extensive reporting on the event:

• Velkommen til Tech BBQ 2013
• Tech BBQ – del 2: Startups
• Tech BBQ – del 3: Keynote og vækstvirksomheder
• Tech BBQ: En god eksponering
• Tech BBQ: Minister vil i dialog med de danske iværksættere

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