Lisbon Challenge 2017: Meet the Promising Startups That Will Join the Acceleration Stage

September 25, 2017

The Lisbon Challenge has just concluded the first stage of the program, the dreaded Bootcamp. After a careful selection process, we finally made the difficult decision of selecting 9 startups to join our accelerator and to receive initial investment.

Meet the 9 selected startups

  1. City Check – a location-based game app that allows families to play contextual games and find awesome characters while visiting the world;
  2. Luvotels – the booking.com for motels. Last minute, by-the-hour, discrete bookings of a room when passion can’t wait. Built on Ruby on Rails;
  3. MonitorFish – fish farming made easy using cognitive capabilities of artificial intelligence to ensure high quality and quantity of fish output;
  4. Parkio – connecting drivers with parking spaces. Parkio helps drivers to find parking and pay for parking on the go;
  5. Placeme – an online app that allows entrepreneurs to choose the location for their business by predicting sales potential and help manage it afterwards;
  6. Reckon.ai – a SaaS application that automates price optimisation, helping retailers to have the right product in the right place with the best price;
  7. Sparkl – offering ‘Beauty on Demand’, providing beauty services wherever you are; 
  8. Tiger Time – a simple, yet powerful time management app that uses the leading productivity systems to help busy people study better and work harder;
  9. Wine MNT – the match.com for the wine industry. Wine MNT joins the two main players of the wine supply chain – producers and importers/distributers.

So, what have the startups learned so far?

The Bootcamp was an intensive week that lasted from the 4th until the 8th of September, where the teams worked on the initial steps of their business. All the startups worked with the business model canvas, made financial projections, defined their go to market strategy, drafted a competitive analysis, and presented their pitch decks. After 5 days of hard work, we were able to ultimately choose the teams to move on to the acceleration phase.

What can the startups expect from the next phase?

Now, the 9 promising startups will be going through the second phase of the Lisbon Challenge. During the acceleration, they’ll have the time to focus on validating their business, developing their product, and launching their startup from Lisbon to the world.

At the end, up to 4 startups will receive an additional 50K funding and 6 months of office space.

 

This article was originally posted on the Lisbon Challenge Blog.