Expert jury
Luckily, we didn’t have to make the difficult decision on who is going home with the jury award on our own. We were blessed with the presence and expertise of the following startup experts who selected the winner of the jury award:
- Christian Segal: Head of the sales team for the Digital Industry at Berliner Sparkasse
- Bettine Schmitz:
Director of portfolio development at Axel Springer’s Plug & Play Accelerator as well as Co-founder of AUXXO Beteiligungen
- Robin Tech: Co-founder and managing director of delphai
- Alina Bassi: Founder and CEO of Kleiderly & alumnus of High-Tech SeedLab (formerly AtomLeap High-Tech Accelerator)
Startup pitches
Audience Award
Since remote event formats can be somewhat lengthy, the High-Tech SeedLab demo day turned the audience into jurors, making the event fun, engaging and worth-wile for everyone watching.
After all pitch presentations were concluded, the audience got a chance to vote for their favourite startup using an online voting tool. As a result, Leaf Labs was crowned the winner of the audience award. The startup aims to close the digitization loop of brick-and-mortar businesses by connecting the customers with their retailer via smart, digital receipts. Leaf Labs won a workshop on strategic narrative sponsored by WAALD Creative Group.
Jury Award
After seeing all of the seven pitches it was time for the jury members to head into their break-out room to discuss who did best tonight. It wasn’t an easy decision to make as all startups heavily improved their pitch performance and worked on optimising their business model throughout the past 10 months of High-Tech SeedLab’s accelerator program.
The jury’s rating was based on the following criteria:
- Product: Has the team communicated a clear USP? Did they clearly positioned themselves in a realistic competitive landscape?
- Team: Do the team members have the skills and experience needed to successfully bring this business idea forward?
- Development: Is there a visible development of the idea and the team over the course of the High-Tech SeedLab acceleration program?
- Impact: To what extent does the startup incorporate the three central factors of sustainability (environmental, social, economical) in their business model?
- Presentation: Presentation skills, clarity and quality of pitch.
After a fruitful discussion, the jury members selected team Lesan as winner of the jury award. Lesan builds machine translation systems for low resource languages. The prize package consists of a €1,000 cash prize sponsored by Berliner Sparkasse as well as an investor dinner together with Rheingau Founders.
We would like to thank everyone who participated in our Demo Day, our sponsors and everyone who tuned in.
We will continue to follow the journey of all of our startups and are looking forward to our upcoming batch of 2021. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay tuned and be the first to learn about the teams participating in our upcoming accelerator round.
For questions about the program and our curriculum, please contact [email protected].
This program is financed by the European Social Fund (ESF), as well as the State of Berlin.