And just like that, the EU-Startups Summit has wrapped up for another year! We really enjoyed sharing two days of networking, inspiration and learning with all of you and can’t wait to do it all again next year!

Over 2,000 attendees came together to connect in Barcelona and we had some incredibly insightful talks on our workshop stage, inspiring keynotes on the main stage, and of course – our electrifying Pitch Competition! Thank you so much to everyone who joined us in sunny Barcelona!

At this year’s Pitch Competition we welcomed 14 of Europe’s most exciting early-stage startups on to the main stage to battle it out for a prize package worth €160k. Prior to the event we had narrowed down the 14 finalists from a monumental 1,300 applications.

The Prize Package

This year’s prize package was incredible! With a total value of over €160k, it included everything on a startup’s wishlist to kickstart a skyrocketing future:

• €50k investment proposal by APX (after a quick due diligence process). APX is Europe’s leading earliest-stage VC, backed by Axel Springer and Porsche, and supports and partners with the most ambitious pre-seed startups from Europe and beyond – often as their first investor.
• €50k funding opportunity with Look AI Ventures: The finalist gets fast-tracked and invited to pitch directly in front of Look AI Ventures‘ investment committee. After standard due diligence and the green light from the committee, there will be a funding opportunity of €50k (potentially up to €250k).
• €36k of Scaleway cloud credits as part of their Growth Stage Startup Program. The Scaleway cloud credits will be given in 12 x €3k monthly instalments.
• €9.9k in credits for an explainer video maker account of simpleshow. This enterprise license corresponds to 1 year and includes up to 5 users, and it contains all customization features and access to all the assets on the platform.
• 1 year of Pipedrive (Sales CRM) – professional package of Pipedrive for 10 team members (value: ~€6k).
• €3k in credits for the cloud communications platform Vonage, which allows startups to integrate voice, video and messaging into their applications.
• 3 year CLUB membership and an exhibition table at the EU-Startups Summit 2023, including 3 event tickets (total package value: ~€5k)
• 1 year Guru Plan for SEMrush worth €2.2k, which gives you access to their SEO and online visibility management SaaS platform.

Pitching on the main stage

The 14 finalists represented different verticals from across Europe’s startup ecosystem – from foodtech to healthtech to greentech and everything in between. We also had representation from across the continent. The finalists who joined us on the main stage were: Bumpy, Deep Talk, Carbon Glance, Fingreen AI, ADix, InsightHack, Legit.Health, Ochy, Zario, Bayfikr, Recloud, Spatialise, Twinical and Machineric.

During the pitches, it’s fair to say we were all on the edge of our seats and with such hot competition our expert jury had a hard time choosing the winning startup – it wasn’t just the Barcelona sun heating things up at this year’s Summit! Our investor panel consisted of Henric Hungerhoff (APX), Borja Breña (Nauta Capital), and Veronika Argust (Look AI Ventures).

And the winner is..!

Taking the prestigious title of Pitch Competition Champion, this year’s winner is Zario!

Founded in 2021, the Zurich based startup Zario is a digital wellbeing app that helps people develop a healthier relationship with their phone. It gamifies screen time reduction and uses innovative features grounded in psychology research, designed to gradually reduce screen time and promote digital wellbeing. Zario provides the tools, and healthy habitual alternatives to “mindless scrolling” and gives us control on how much time we want to spend on any given platform. Zario is the first global app to help people live more digitally balanced lives. They use the latest psychology research to create engaging challenges in the real world to help reduce and replace unhealthy screen time consumption. Although the smartphone is one of the best tools of human creation and interaction, the way and purpose of using it needs to be refocused.

Zario helps you improve your habits by at least 1% each day, which means a 100% change in 70 days. At Zario they always prioritize your privacy and your data remains yours. According to the founding team, all challenges are completed offline and Zario will never sell your data.

Zario founder Ondrej Zak made an incredibly compelling pitch on the day, and given the win-win-win dynamic to their offering, they made for worthy winners of this year’s contest, and we are very excited to see how they will grow and scale over the next year. The Zario team will now be able to use their generous prize package to scale their vision of helping to reduce and replace unhealthy screen time consumption.

We want to send a huge “well done” to all the participants of this year’s Pitch Competition – it really was a nail-biting affair. To make it to the final 14 out of so many applications is itself an incredible achievement. 

You think your startup has what it takes? Keep an eye out for our 2024 edition on May 9-10 in Malta!

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• Source: https://www.eu-startups.com/2023/04/introducing-zario-the-winner-of-the-eu-startups-summit-2023-pitch-competition/