TechDemoDay selected 50 of the best tech start-ups of the moment and gave them the chance to exhibit their projects in front of investors, major companies and other attendants, helping them to access business opportunities, visibility and a greater connection with the ecosystem. The start-ups taking part came from a variety of fields such as Smarts Cities (VadeCity, anti-theft bike parking), Tech (Airplane S), Data (Gantabi, data analysis for the improvement of transport logistics), eCommerce and Marketplace (1001 Portals, real estate portal), Human Resources (MyWorkUp, incubated at La Salle Technova, which has just closed a financing round of €600K); b2B services (Chaingotech, sea freight documentation software, and Musiclist, a music streaming service, and Goin, a solution to help save money); and eHealth (Genomcore, genomic medicine platform for healthcare providers), among others. As for companies, almost 250 attended the event, with big names including Schneider, Suez and HP, among many others.
The event kicked off with a lecture by Prof. Jerome Engel (UC Berkeley), the international expert in innovation, entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, who spoke about strategies to connect corporations with technology-based start-ups in order to obtain a permanent flow of disruptive innovation.
While the attendees visited the different start-ups, representatives from the endeavours offered a series of pitches, as well as round tables on the theme of entrepreneurship from different perspectives: with technology-based investors, corporations that are collaborating with start-ups, a round table on scaling up business and growth strategies with Wallapop, Glover and Holaluz, and experiences of entrepreneurs that have emerged from La Salle.
At the end of the event, various prizes were awarded to those start-ups that stood out in a number of fields: Start-up with most traction (interest among target audience) was awarded to Musiclist, which in 2018 has had 2 million downloads of its App; Start-up which has closed the largest round of investment recently was awarded to Goin, with more than 2 million euros in two months; and the award for start-up that has created the most jobs went to Telanto, with 20 positions opened in the last year.
