Over 500 people turned out to the TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off in Stockholm last night, at a venue over-looking one of the most beautiful views in the world: The Stockholm city hall and bay. It’s a tough life!
Some 10 startups participated in the pitch-off competition in front of a panel of esteemed VC judges and TechCrunch editors. These included Marta Sjögren, Northzone; Sean Percival, 500 Startups; Mattias Ljungman, Atomico; Lars Jörnow, EQT Ventures (who also generously sponsored our event). We also happened to be in town during the new creative tech festival Symposium event which takes place in the city this week.
Of course, at our pitch-off there could only be one winner and two runners up. The winner was Arthro Therapeutics, followed by Peppy Pals and MIND Music Labs.
Arthro Therapeutics is a new startup which says it can diagnose and treat the chronic condition osteoarthritis online to a 70% reduced cost and with 400% productivity increase, clinically validated. Osteoarthritis costs $189 billion annually in the US and is more common than diabetes, so this is a really big problem to tackle. Jakob Dahlberg, CEO, and his team will now be exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt London in December.
Peppy Pals wins tickets to Disrupt London. It describes itself thus: “Peppy Pals is an award-winning EdTech platform developing fun, educational games and books nurturing children’s Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Our games have been featured by Amazon and Google globally. It’s a unique way of learning and experiencing emotions, empathy, collaboration and friendship without “”right or wrong””. We use no-text, instead we use story-telling and impressive animations. We’ve acquired 190,000 users across 140 countries and 7% of the local market in 2 years. Unlike many other children’s app developers we’re not dependent on AppStores. We’ve also signed our first B2B deal with one of the biggest fast-food chains in Sweden (MAX).”
MIND Music Labs also wins a ticket to Disrupt London. It “develops connected instruments that boost the way musicians express themselves. MIND’s SENSUS is the World’s first REAL SmartGuitar: it’s a guitar, a wireless music system and an IoT device. It plays like a guitar, but its technology evolves what you can do: add infinite modulations to your music, stream and play on your favorite songs, share your performances online or take advantage of IoT features and add new levels or interaction to your performances – all with no accessories and no speakers: all sound is produced in high definition by the guitar’s wooden body.”
See you again some time Stockholm!
The other startups that pitched were:
DPOrganizer
“DPOrganizer puts you in control of your processing of personal data. A tool to help you map and understand how it all fits together, so that you can focus on making the right choices. DPOrganizer helps organisations around the world ensure compliance with data protection regulations, thereby reducing risk of fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global turnover.”
Guestrument
Play and compose music in any style with both full theoretical control and complete freedom of expression. Gestrument lets you delve into the ”musical DNA” of a song, artist or genre by defining pitches, rhythms & more. Gestrument is both an intuitive app for the beginner and a very powerful tool for the professional.”
Lifee
“An activity bracelet for kids that turns the whole world into a playground. The activity bracelet is designed to encourage activity rather than track it and together with our app the experience can be shared among friends, used in different kind of games, parents can encourage their kids with special challenges etc. “A widely based team with both the experience of serial entrepreneurs, and the energy of a core team mostly straight out of the university.”
Mentimeter
“Easy to use audience engagement platform used during presentations.”
Touchtech
“Touchtech is the creator of the software products, Vendo and Lima, that will revolutionize the way retail stores and showrooming are envisioned. They offer customers instant access to the full product range by bringing it digitally using large format multi-touch screens to the physical store in a unique, innovating and truly captivating way, enabling orders to be made right off the shop-floor.”
Vainu
“Vainu is like your personal sales assistant – only smarter. It finds you the best leads out of millions of companies and tells you when it’s the right time to contact them. It also knows how your customers are doing and notifies you whenever there’s a chance to boost your upsales. You save time and sell more. It’s more than big data analytics.”
Workaround
“Workaround makes it super easy to use the entire city as your office by digitalizing the processes of renting and sub-letting vacant office space.”
