by Carolina Santos | Jan 10, 2018 | Startups
Beta-i’s having a national tour. Yes, like we were a rock band, the difference is we’re not singing, we’re seeking talent, and we are not listening to music, we’re listening to pitches. But still, we want startups to ask us for an encore everytime we threaten to leave.
The first stop of our tour was Aveiro thanks to IEUA – Incubadora de Empresas da Universidade de Aveiro in the name of Vera Reis, Cândida Cardoso and specially to Adriana Costa, Incubator Director who has always greeted us on the best way possible and has done an incredible work. We started with a workshop of “How to Pitch” given by Gualberto Pastor and was a good way to break the ice.
After that was the elevator pitch, a 30-second pitch that everyone was gladly happy to do. It is amazing the level of the startups we found there raging from the energy sector, to health and artificial intelligence like Scubic, ASHA or YouClap. All proof that Portugal is becoming a strong ecosystem in itself, it’s not just Lisbon, it’s the whole country.
It is important to say we also learnt from our attendees. Sure, we knew we would find good startups and people willing to work and do new things, but the truth is we ended up meeting this person who reminded us why we started doing what we do in the first place, we met the face of the true entrepreneur, this extremely talented boy that makes you believe that our country can make a difference because we are extremely gifted.
We hope we’ll cross paths with them in the near future and we hope to continue to meet new and exciting portuguese startups.
by aristeasapera | Dec 7, 2017 | Corporates, Investors, Startups
It’s been two weeks since Smart Open Lisboa 2017, the biggest open innovation program directly connected to the city, came to an end. In the second, remastered and more extended edition the finalist startups had the amazing opportunity to validate their solutions in real time and in real environment contributing to the upgrade of city life.
The partners of the program, Lisbon City Council, Tourism of Portugal, Cisco, Altice, Sharing Cities, Grow, Masai, EPAL & Beta-i chose to focus on 4 intervention fields called challenges: Tourism & Culture, Mobility, Citizen Engagement and Sustainability.
During the Demo Day, our teams presented the learnings they got from the whole program, the results of the Experimentation and their next steps.
On the Tourism challenge, AppyFans, a gamification app that serves as a personal assistant for local shopping, managed to establish a collaboration with 10 of the central stores from the Lojas com história network and they are about to extend this number beyond the program. Go WiFi, the largest network in Portugal of around 200 free wifi hotspots also joined their platform. Following Lisbon, they closed a partnership with the Association of Merchants of Porto to market the platform of their 2.000 associates.
In the area of Sustainability, GreenbyWeb after installing their product Aquamote, a smart irrigation system, in the green spaces of Avenida da Liberdade and Praça de Espanha achieved 71% water savings. While they still have their controllers operating there, they will soon install also in Martim Moniz gardens and they are in contacts with other city councils in Portugal.
Our finalist Trigger Systems with their dedicated IoT platform & apps deployed different solutions for city efficiency and control. Their ongoing irrigation pilot in Jardim de Estrela achieved to decrease water consumption and workforce. The installation of LoRa smart meter controllers at the offices of our partner EPAL facilitated the analytics of consumption data and alerts, among other things. Finally, at Rossio square they installed fountain controllers for the people to interact with through a QR code.
In Mobility, the startup KLC with an electric shared mobility solution for companies has been running a pilot with Card4B (member of the MASAI platform), which will continue for 2 months more. Meanwhile they are getting useful feedback from the users and finalising their mobile app that will mainly permit fleet management, plus having other helpful features.
On the way to increase road safety SOSplus collaborated with Civil Protection & Firemen headquarters and installed their tracker device on 7 ambulances. In this way, they were able to get their first users/drivers, improve their app and at the same time learn first hand the needs of their client. Among their future plans is to integrate into third party apps.
Regarding intelligent transport systems Connect Robotics, a drone delivery service for different kinds of goods, thanks to the interactions with the Partners during the program has discovered various areas of operations. Although they didn’t manage so far to get permissions for the city flights, they got a lot of learnings on the risks they need to consider and they are now working on a collaboration with Europe University for the transport of books & docs.
Another case of product development & useful learnings is Openly, on the Citizen engagement challenge; a search engine to find instantly any governmental info or service. During the Experimentation they made connections with different public initiatives of Lisbon’s City Council, which helped them understand the landscape and test the first versions of their product. Now the bigger picture for them is to organise world’s governance information and so far they have mapped local info of 86 countries and collected around 200K government sources.
As we are always aiming to be better on the work we deliver at Beta-i and take every challenge as a learning opportunity, we are now redesigning the new edition of Smart Open Lisboa program. Watch out for the coming updates on our website.
Watch all the emotion for yourself here.
by anunes | Dec 7, 2017 | Corporates, Startups
The use of APIs will accelerate the digital transformation of the financial landscape already sparked by the emergence of financial technology (or FinTech) companies.
Open Banking is just around the corner for European countries, with banks having to open up their data through application programming interfaces (APIs) by January 13 2018.
With public APIs, customers will have more options to interact with their bank. In this scenario, the bank will serve as a platform, on top of which third-party companies (such as startups) can build their own applications using the bank’s data to engage with customers.
Instead of doing all of their banking through one or two firms, customers will most likely have their current account with one provider and then aggregate financial services through other providers, all under the user interface of their choosing.
The Portuguese one-stop for all main banks data
In Portugal there’s an even more straightforward approach that will allow startups to access all main Portuguese banks data in a single platform instead of going to each bank API and adjust their solution in a case-by-case scenario.
Here, SIBS, the country main Fintech innovator, is already working together with the main banks to create an open API standard. This will mean for startups a one-stop access to the main Portuguese banks costumer data.
Startups will be able to build new products and services by accessing and integrating customer’s banking data – with their permission – into their applications.
But, more than this, startups can also have access to further support from SIBS in moving forward their solutions, including the co-development of new solutions, through the new edition of SIBSPAYFORWARD acceleration program, which as applications open until December 15.
Open door to deliver the Fintech Promise
For Fintech startups this changes mean an opportunity to fulfill their promise, the promise of groundbreaking technologies that will transform completely the financial landscape and the way consumers interact with financial products, by generating solutions that consumers will want to use in a widespread way.
by Carolina Santos | Dec 7, 2017 | Investors, Startups
After 10 weeks of intensive work and mentorship, the eight startups from Lisbon Challenge found out which ones were getting an investment, but there were no winners or losers, because even the ones who weren’t invested have already closed their first pilots and are ready to make their baby startups grow.
It is not typical for an Investor’s day to be at a brewery but it turned out to be the perfect scenario. They walked to the stage full of confidence and nerves, we could feel their dry mouths while they were pitching and if we could guess their heart rates were racing like crazy. The smile of relief each one of them had while leaving the stage, after asking several questions from investors, was priceless.
They did what they were mentored to do and all of them delivered flawless pitches and made everybody proud. It was good to see that those eight teams became friends, kind of a family and that what an acceleration program is also about.
Yesterday Luvotels, Sparkl and Placeme found out they were being invested. Luvotels got 50k, Sparkl also got 50k and Placeme got 75k, a surprise to all but mainly to those who got it. The ones who weren’t invested are going to continue to work hard towards their goal and we know they are going far.
Today the office is quieter and emptier than it used to be and we all already miss them. The good thing is there will always be another Lisbon Challenge.
Follow the footsteps of these startups and get 10K in 10 weeks.
by Carolina Santos | Nov 30, 2017 | Startups
It was 7 a.m. last Tuesday when the eight startups from Lisbon Challenge took the train to Aveiro. Waiting for them they had Adriana Costa, Director of IEUA – Incubadora de Empresas da Universidade de Aveiro, and Cândida Cardoso, Manager of Incubation Services, who drove them around the main touristic sights of the city.
Adriana Costa showing the Creative Science Park to the Startups.
Today more than ever all partnerships are important and the one between Lisbon Challenge and IEUA has just now begin to grow. The truth is: the ecosystem involves the whole country, it does not start or end in Lisbon and working together with other accelerators can benefit both parties because there’s an exchange of knowledge that is crucial both to startups and accelerators.
One of the highlights of the trip was visiting the Creative Science Park which will be inaugurated on 2018 and where some of the startups will have the privilege to work and grow as well as be close to companies such as Bosch, Nestlé or Altice and, at the same time, close to the university.
The startups pitched to investors from Red Angels, Best Horizon and LC Ventures – all of them are going to be on Investor’s Day on December 6 – to practice for the big day, get some feedback and to start growing on the investors.
Parkio and Monitor Fish with our investor Pedro Falcão.
There was still time to meet PET Universal, a software for vets and IEUA alumni as well as 3D printer labs from BEEVERYCREATIVE, also an alumni. And, of course, a trip to Aveiro would not be complete without some “ovos moles” and other typical sweets.
Now it is time to prepare for the most important pitch of their lives, wait for the grand opening of the Creative Science Park, pack their bags and grow their business in Aveiro.
