Best Startups Presented at IT Arena 2016
Out of more than 100 startups that applied for Startup Competition last year, only 11 have been selected for the final round. The international jury, consisting of 12 people have chosen the overall winners. The lucky dozen pitched their startups in front of Esther Dyson – the world-famous investor, Chairman at EDventure Holdings and the most influential women in IT according to The New York Times, Oleksiy Vitchenko, CEO at Digital Future, Max Gurvits, Director for CEE, CIS, and MENA at Cross Border Angels, Natalia Berezovska, Chairman of the Board at UANGEL and others.
The jury evaluated startups in 3 categories, team, business model and system of attracting clients. A startup from Slovakia called “Likely” won the nomination “The Best B2C Startup”. Lucas Ruttkay and Josef Marko explain: “Lots of people share photos online to increase their popularity. Our platform changes the way people evaluate your photo. Let’s imagine that out of 5 thousand pictures of you or your product, “Likely” will choose the one that will likely get the most likes. This platform will increase your post popularity in dozens of times”.
In January 2017, Likely has been accepted in Velocity Accelerator with their team moving to Birmingham, AL, USA.
Ukrainian startup Blynk won the nomination “The Best Pitch”. Blynk is a Platform with iOS and Android apps to control Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the likes over the Internet. It’s a digital dashboard where you can build a graphic interface for your project by simply dragging and dropping widgets.
Volodymyr, Co-Founder of the startup says that using Blynk any software engineer will be able to start a ready interface in 1-2 weeks.
Other presented startups included:
Senstone – a device which automatically converts your voice notes into text and organizes them for easy access. Senstone has recently collected more than 300,000$ on KickStar which was 6 times more than the initial expectations.
May B – an app for 3D printing which allows you to download a file and print in out on a 3D printer. The app reminds iTunes however instead of multimedia files, there will be files with designs to various things, except weapons or devices for drug consumption.
Mysales labs – a platform that uses machine learning algorithm to determine the dependence of sales on factors that may affect them. It’s a kind of a smart prediction that takes into account season, trends, discounts, the number of products, exchange rates etc.
Also, Kray Protection – a drone that pollinates crops, able to handle 500 hectares per day; Stickerpipe – a mobile app that allows online purchase of stickers and images; Cycling – a mobile platform that enables cyclists to communicate with each other, compete and assist in case of an accident.