Welcoming the teams of 2021 EIT Digital Venture Program

Running for the fourth year in a row, Found.ation is proud to facilitate the EIT Digital Venture Program, a unique accelerator with the purpose to actively support early stage startups in 20 European countries. So far we have supported 24 startups, providing 360.000 euros in funding. 2021 marks our fourth edition, with 9 fresh startups that have been selected to participate in the program.

Please welcome our freshest cohort:

• ARGOS is a smart city solution and community platform for stray animals’ welfare.
• Deepconomy is a solution that automates your accounting workflow using Artificial Intelligence.
• Energy Shift enables citizens to jointly invest and co-own solar parks.
• Enforge is a factory digitalization solution to enable manufacturers, mass-deliver personalized products, faster & at a lower cost.
• Plantee aims to offer tree-planting as a service, making it as easy as a click to help grow your business and change the course of carbon removal.
• Renthis2me offers a platform that facilitates the act of borrowing and lending items between two parties. In a single phrase we could be characterized as the “Airbnb” for items.
• SciDrones is detecting and monitoring marine litter on coastal zones.
• Silent Inbox is a Gmail plugin that lets you regain control of your inbox. You can control how frequently you’ll see promotional emails and when you want to view them with a click of a button.
• WowMind is a micro video based e-learning platform perfectly adapted to the digital generation, adding new dimensions to formal education and bringing a systemic approach to learning.

We would also like to note that we are extremely happy to see and welcome so many female founders among this year’s applicants and selected teams.

The accelerator kicked-off in May with a 2-day bootcamp, during which the startups got to know their mentors and start learning the basics of entrepreneurship: from business plan and service design to legal issues and how to reach investors. Even though for yet another year, sadly, we didn’t have the chance to meet in person with our teams, our experience in online-only events helped us keep the participants engaged on webinars and interactive workshops. Our teams come from various locations from Greece, Romania and Cyprus, so at least we made it easier for everyone to attend.

A big thank you to Federico Menna, EIT Digital Head of Staff and Operations, Lorenzo Sanna, EIT Digital’s Venture Program Lead and of course to our wonderful instructors, especially Dr. Antonis Livieratos, Thanos Leontaris (Ratio Law), Lambros Zolotas (HMD Global) and Natalia Deligiorgi (Performance Coaching), Dimitris Kalavros-Gousiou (Co-Founder and General Partner at Velocity.Partners) and Constantinos Nikolaidis (Senior Analyst at Velocity.Partners) for offering their expertise and wisdom, and keeping the teams engaged throughout those two days.

Stay tuned for the virtual Demo Day, on July. The teams will present their progress in front of investors, industry stakeholders and journalists – an equally challenging task.