Pitching competition tours around Europe are getting more and more frequent, and Paris is evidently one of the top places to stop. If you are a young French startup willing to impress people in the industry, raise (more) funds or simply improve your pitching skills, then save the date on October 15th, as Startup Sauna makes a halt in Paris. Startup Sauna is a start up accelerator from Helsinki Finland, who has helped more than 100 companies raise more than 20 million in funding since its creation in 2010. They are now touring 25 cities around the world.
After passing through many other European cities like Oslo, Prague, Copenhagen, Budapest, etc, Startup Sauna is stopping for the first time in Paris. The Paris pitch event is also being hosted by Ubifrance. For the pitching competition, the team is looking for early stage companies in France. Miki Kuusi, Executive Director of Startup Sauna explains: “Startup Sauna is on a mission to help the next generation of great companies break through on a global level,”. “While Helsinki has become the center of the startup ecosystem in Northern Europe given the widespread success of Linux, Git, MySQL and Skype, we’re really looking to get inspired by what’s happening in France,” Kuusi continues.
The winner of the pitching competition will have a chance to travel to and pitch at the Slush startup conference also organized by Startup Sauna. Over the last 6 years, the conference has become a hot point in Northern Europe growing rapidly from 300 person gathering in the early days to more than 5000 attendees expected this year. For those interested, Slush will take place in Helsinki on November 13-14.
The jury for the pitching competition in Paris will be composed by:
- Nicolas Brusson, the founder of BlaBlaCar, and also one of the speakers at Slush conference
- Liam Boogar, Cofounder, CEO & Editor at Rude Baguette
- Nadia Echchihab, European Projects Manager for the business cluster Cap Digital
- Eric Morand, Head of New Technologies, Innovation & Services division at Ubifrance
If you’d like to apply to pitch at the Paris event, you can register on Eventbrite. Good luck!
