Last Wednesday seven new agri-food startups successfully completed the StartLife Accelerate program. For three months they received intensive training and support to further shape, refine an accelerate their business. They ended the program with a presentation to a large group of investors and corporates, known as graduation day.
Pressure Cooker
From more than 50 startups that applied only seven were selected to take part in StartLife’s pressure cooker for high-tech agrifood startups. For Alexis Vlandas, co-founder of the French company Zymoptiq, the ‘pressure’ played an important role in the decision to apply to the program. “We don’t have such intensive startup support in France. StartLife challenged our business model in every way and we were “forced” to make important, validated choices in a short period of time. As a result, we made major progress in a very short time, which is exactly what we wanted to achieve.”
‘Farm to Fork’ network
StartLife has close connections to a wide range of companies and organizations throughout the agri-food value chain. This “farm to fork” – network also offers a lot of added value to the participating startups. Davide Parisi, CEO of the Italian startup Evja agrees. “Warm introductions to the right people and parties are worth gold. StartLife provided us valuable insights on the Dutch market and ecosystem as a whole, which allowed us to enhance our next steps in terms of product and business strategy.“
Graduation Day
The acceleration program was completed with a demo day: a presentation to approximately 120 investors, bankers, business executives, innovation managers, researchers and other relations from the (inter)national StartLife network. Marijn Frank, known from the Dutch TV program “Keuringsdienst van Waarde”, hosted the presentation of the startups to the audience, who were then invited to ask question to the startups.
One of the questions that an angel investor asked Gerhold ten Voorde, founder of Corvus Drones, was whether greenhouse growers are waiting for his data-gathering drones, after all, can they just as well install camera’s? Gerhold immediately had a clear answer to this: “To monitor all plants in a one-hectare greenhouse you easily need a thousand camera’s. That is a costly affair. You achieve the same result with just one drone.” A convincing answer that was followed up with a 1-on-1 conversation during the closing drink.
Open call to next agri-food challengers
The StartLife team is already fully engaged with the preparations for the next StartLife Accelerate program, which will run from April to June 2020. Do you want to follow the footsteps of StartLife alumni such as Fumi Ingrediënts, Zero Foodwaste and Hudson River Biotechology? Then register before February 1st .
