At this year’s TechChill 2018 Crowdestor publicly presented project Tesla Taxi park Riga in cooperation with Taxify. For Crowdestor it was exciting to try Tesla model X and model S in Riga by transporting TechChill speakers from Riga airport to event location.
TechChill is a startup community non-profit with the goal to encourage the development of startup and technology ecosystem, international recognition, and attracting investments. The most important annual event hosted by the organization is TechChill - the largest tech event in Latvia took place at February 8-9 in Riga, in VEF Culture Palace. The most promising startups from the Baltic Sea region - from the Baltics, Nordics and Central Eastern Europe - meet and match with global investors and business angels. A two day agenda across three stages included 100 speakers, including experienced founders, innovators, startup community leaders, tech media, investors and top experts in their field, with several opportunities of formal and informal networking.
Anatomy Next, a human body simulator for doctors to practice in virtual reality, were the winners of the TechChill Fifty Founders Battle on Friday night. The healthtech startup went home with a check for 10 000 EUR, no strings attached, to invest in their company. The main prize was presented by Google for Entrepreneurs.
Other startup finalists received valuable prizes from TechChill supporters. AdLaunch (Finland), an AI assisted video creation and reversioning for programmatic video ads, received 20 000 EUR in credits to the Google Cloud Platform from Google for Entrepreneurs. AdLaunch was also awarded 1000 EUR worth of legal advice from TechChill long-time supporters, Law Firm Hedman Partners. Digipulse (Latvia), the first digital asset inheritance service, went home with free Microsoft mentoring and Azur compute environment. Winmill (Latvia), who develop computer vision aided robotic systems for sports, received private year-long mentoring from PwC Latvija.
Other finalists who pitched on the main stage were Fractory.co (Estonia), a one-stop-shop for manufacturing services; Hooves (Denmark) a startup to connect horses and riders and Silvere (Finland) which evaluates forests with the highest accuracy in the world.
The final jury members who evaluated the pitches were Raimonds Dauksts (PwC), Connor Swenson (Google), Toomaas Seppel (Law Firm Hedman Partners), Toms Zunna (Microsoft), Cristobal Alonso (Startup Wise Guys), Andris K. Berzins (Change Ventures), Hussein Kanji (Hoxton Ventures), Kristjan Laanemaa (Karma VC), Indrikis Liepa (Cobalt) and Kristine Kornilova, COO at TechChill.
This year, TechChill introduced a completely changed the pitch competition selection and pitching format. Half of the startups were recommended and hand-picked by the ecosystem partners, co-working hubs, accelerators from the nearby region. The other half were selected from an open application process. The main criteria for the evaluation were traction, market, team, and product. The Fifty Founders Battle gave the opportunity for fifty selected startups to pitch on the LMT Founder Stage on the first day of the event in front of the jury and investors. The format increased the opportunities for startups to pitch their ideas to investors and get a better chance of making an impression on possible future investors. The startups this year come from 11 countries, from Germany to Belarus, and represent a wide range of services and products. More information: techchill.co
