EIT Digital Venture Program Demo Day 2021

Presenting the progress of your work in front of an audience consisting of more than 75 participants, including investors, journalists, mentors, industry stakeholders and other professionals who synced with the online Demo Day on Tuesday, July 6, is definitely not an easy task. But the 9 teams who reached the third stage of the EIT Digital Venture Program 2021, really nailed it!

Federico Menna, the EIT Digital Head of Staff and Operations, attended the Demo Day and highlighted the progress of the teams and the impressive quality of the projects. The 9 teams had 5 minutes each to present their progress and some more time to answer a number of questions coming from the highly engaged audience.

Before re-introducing the teams, just allow us to add some context: 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 Found.ation has supported 24 startups, providing 360.000 euros in funding. 2021 marks the fourth edition, with 9 fresh startups that have been selected to participate in the program.

This year, the teams that made it through come from Greece, Cyprus and Romania, bringing a variety of deep tech concepts on the table. Ideas about the environment, personal finance, strays and more have already caught attention and were presented online during the Demo Day.

The 9 teams (in the order they presented their cases) are:

• SciDrones is detecting and monitoring marine litter on coastal zones.
• 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.
• Enforge is a factory digitalization solution to enable manufacturers, mass-deliver personalized products, faster & at a lower cost.
• Deepconomy is a solution that automates your accounting workflow using Artificial Intelligence.
• ARGOS is a smart city solution and community platform for stray animals’ welfare.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Energy Shift enables citizens to jointly invest and co-own solar parks.

Since the beginning of the EIT Digital Venture Program 2021, all of the teams have been working on the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 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.

Want to know more about the Program? Check out all details for the EIT Digital Venture Program and start getting ready for 2022!