What happened at the second day of Startup Fest Europe? Highlights from Water Tech Fest in Leeuwarden, F&A Next in Wageningen, High Tech Capital in Eindhoven and The Future of High Tech in Enschede.
Techilicious
Tech incubator YES!Delft was transformed into a restaurant on Wednesday evening (main photo). 50 promising tech startups dined with corporates of shell, KPN, Airbus, Philips and more to make some deals. This resulted in over 70 deals, including a 100k investment for Grwo by Microsoft. Check the Twitter Storify here.
Water Tech Fest
The upcoming startup ambassador/envoy Prince Constantijn opened the Water Tech Fest in Leeuwarden. Gerard Schouten of Dutch Water Technologies is a staple in these kind of events: his startup SALTTECH is an example for every water startup worldwide.
Successful startups in Europe’s waterhub. Gerard Schouten of DWT knows all about that! #salttech pic.twitter.com/2z6RMfLG0N
— WaterCampus (@Watercampus) May 25, 2016
He had precious advice for aspiring startup founders: “As a startup you should involve everybody in your company, even your family.”
High Tech Capital
High Tech Capital started at the Philips football stadium with a speech by mayor Rob van Gijzel. He there announced the launch of the Eindhoven Startup Alliance, a group of corporates, government and public sector organizations to support the new HighTechXl accelerator. Also, he said this memorable quote:
Start Ups face “valley of death” at some point. In Taiwan they call it “bridge to innovation”. Nice! @rvangijzel #HTCapital #StartupFestEU
— Joran van Aart (@JoranVanAart) May 25, 2016
F&A Next
In Wageningen, 150 food and agri startups met with nearly hundred investors. The first F&A Next Pitching competition featured 20 startups.
N-Chroma‘s Constantinos Patinios team won the early-stage startup pitching competition. His company uses biotechnological methods to develop and produce natural colours for usage in food, textile and cosmetics. N-Chroma participated in the competition to attract attention from food companies as they identified this sector as their main target market. They are looking for a 500.000 euro investment.
Phenospex, represented by Gregoire Hummel, won the later-stage part of the competition. His startup develops and markets sensors and analysis software to assess and analyse plant performance for agriculture. They aim to be a world leader in plant analysis and automate processes related to plant screening and agriculture. They hope to close an investment deal within the next 4-6 months.
Martijn van Dam, Minister of Agriculture, announced several initiatives to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in food and agri:
* Van Dam encourages the setup of a ‘Food Accelerator’ to provide training, mentoring and advice to start-ups on the interface of agrifood and high tech. He invites everybody that is interested to join this initiative.
* Investment: Van Dam called to investors to set up a joint a 12 million euro Food & Agri Seed Fund. His ministry will contribute the first 6 million and Van Dam invites investors to contribute the other 6 million euro.
Coder Dojo
Today at Water Tech Fest and High Tech Capital several people from the Coder Dojo initiative were there to help children learn to code. Tomorrow they will be in Nijmegen and Saturday they will be at Campus Party in Utrecht.
At #watertechfest we have @CoderDojoNL in the house! Kids making their own game! pic.twitter.com/5JzOvLMiZG
— WaterCampus (@Watercampus) May 25, 2016
The Future of High Tech
Creating a car that drives on Snicker bars is not a problem for the students of the University of Twente (UT). Neither is entrepreneurship, being the most entrepreneurial university of the Netherlands. But if we truly want to solve the grand challenges of our time, in areas such as security, IT and healthcare, we need to link all the relevant dots. Read the report of The Future of High Tech.
Main image: YES!Delft