London Web Summit crowned Seedrs the winner of its startup competition against a crowded field of 19 other competitors today. Managing to gain Financial Services Authority approval for its crowd funding model (in the UK) was deemed an incredibly hard thing to do by the judges, who said they had high hopes its model could kick start a revolution in startup funding. Runner-up position went to BusyFlow, a dashboard for multiple web services. You can check out a run-down of all the other startups here. Deezer also broke the news on stage that it’s launching an offline browser, and Jolicloud launched it’s new Jolicloud Me service.
Seedrs wins the offer of a £50,000 convertible note from DFJ Esprit, £15,000 in legal services from Orrick, £15,000 in advisory services from KPMG and £4,000 in hardware from HP.
In a show which saw 1,000 people attend, London Web Summit just became the biggest tech startup event in the UK (at least until Le Web London arrives in June?). The conference featured Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, Google’s Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora as one of a number of keynotes, including Shervin Pishevar (investor in Uber), Lars Hinrichs (HackFWD), Jason Goldberg (Fab.com), Morten Lund (Tradeshift/Everbread), Ben Parr (formerly Mashable), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp) and Axel Dauchez (Deezer) among others.
You can check out the video archive of all the speeches, panels and firesides here.
The Judges of the startup competition were:
Marcy Simon-Agent Of Change
Giles Hawkings – Orrick
Jon Bradford – Springboard
Tim Payne – KPMG
Robin Wauters – The Next Web
Nic Brisbourne – DFJEsprit
Eze Vidra – Google
Susan Boden – Hewlett Packard
Jos White – Notion Capital
Hercules Fisherman – Herx
Dharmash Mistry – Balderton
Christoph Marie – Txtr
Sanyu Kiruluta – RIM
Riccardo Zacconi – King.com
Bindi Karia – Microsoft
Julian Carter – EC1 Capital
Krzysztof Kowalczyk – Hard Gamma
John Lunn – PayPal
Andrew Humphries – Tech City
Steven Willmott – 3 Scale
Philipp Moehring – Seedcamp