The winners of the founder pitch

Congratulations to the winning teams from this year’s start-up pitch at the NEULAND Innovation Day at KIT.

1st place and audience award went to Phytonics
2nd place for Bytefabrik.AI GmbH
3rd place for enabl Technologies

This year’s participants were Aimino, Bytefabrik.AI, enabl Technologies, FastCast Ceramics, Phytonics and revo.AI. Many thanks to all pitch participants, it was a lot of fun with you! 🙂

Many thanks also to our expert jury with Katharina Peters (High-Tech Gründerfonds), Christian Cara (Geschwister Oetker Beteiligungen KG s), Till Stenzel (SET Ventures) and Patrick Greisans (Wirtschaftsförderung der Stadt Rastatt) as well as to the moderator Katrin-Cécile Ziegler and the audience.

This year, for the first time, a virtual investor speed-dating took place before the founder pitch. 40 DeepTech start-ups/ spin-offs and over 50 DeepTech VCs took part. From 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., there were non-stop 3-minute pitches in English for the investors. Both sides were very excited about this digital event and there will surely be some talks to follow in the coming weeks.

Among the participating start-ups/ spin-offs were those that were in the pre-foundation, pre-seed, seed as well as Series A and Series B phases. In terms of content, the teams came from the hardware and software sectors with a focus on the automotive, energy, materials/chemicals, ICT and more verticals.

At the end of an eventful NEULAND Innovation Day, there was a joint evening in front of the Audimax. Here, good conversations and new contacts took place over cold drinks and delicious food. The expert jury of the start-up pitch was very impressed by our KIT spin-offs and the start-up community around KIT.

In our current podcast episode NACHGEFRAGT we talked to the jury members about the pitch, dos and don’ts when pitching and the atmosphere at the founder pitch.

Have fun listening!