• Vestbee’s CEE Startup Challenge 2023 has final winners
• 10 select startups startups competed for the title and an impressive set of prizes
• The final winner is Ogre AI

On January 7, Vestbee‘s CEE Startup Challenge 2023 culminated with the final startup pitching session, following weeks of rigorous selection of the most promising applicants by an expansive list of judges from the CEE VC ecosystem.

Vestbee’s head of startups & VC Konrad Koncerewicz hosted the session. Without further ado, startups went on to pitching and took approximately three minutes each for pitching and a few more minutes for Q&As. After all the pitches were done and all the judges made up their minds and voted, the winners were announced: Ogre AI came first as Talkie AI and Behavio got the silver and the bronze respectively.

Behavio

This Czech startup offers a B2B SaaS solution for brand marketing. The startup’s co-founder and COO Marek Nebesář and his team noticed that most of marketing budgets get spent on brand building with too little remaining to support the actual sales. ROI on brand marketing is difficult to measure, and brands often don’t measure it at all – also because the existing solutions are expensive and lack user-friendliness.

Behavio solves this by employing the latest scientific discoveries about the works of the human brain to measure and forecast B2C brand marketing effectiveness. Additionally, the platform is affordable and easy to use. The services include brand tracking and ad testing, with brand strategy building scheduled for adding.

The startup is already present in twelve European countries, as well as in the USA, Brazil, and the Philippines. According to Mr Nebesář, it takes around one week for the platform to deploy on a new market.

Talkie AI

This is a Polish-born startup that provides AI-powered voicebots. More specifically, the startup’s patented voicebots are on a mission to increase the speed and accuracy of call centers of healthcare institutions. The voicebots can manage appointments and prescriptions, and the company has already set a firm foot in North America.

According to Talkie AI’s co-founder and CEO Paweł Lipiński, 74% of patient interaction happens over the phone, which presents cost and staffing challenges. As patients’ expectations (e.g. 24/7 increase, so does front desk staff turnover and staff shortage, as well as the no-show rate and its cost to the sector’s economy. Talke AI’s mission is to minimize these challenges.

Thus, Talke AI helps three groups of stakeholders:

• Healthcare organizations can streamline their process, utilize their staff better, and thus even expand their scope of services
• Patient access teams can serve patients better and more efficiently
• Patients themselves enjoy better experience

The startup plans to raise a Series A round in 2024 with the goal of further scaling in North America.

Ogre AI

This Romanian B2B platform provides AI/ML-powered decision-making assistance to energy and utilities companies with a focus on green efficiency. According to the current regulations, all the energy operators – producers, suppliers, grid operators, etc. – are obligated to provide forecasts of their figures on a daily basis. The penalties resulting from inaccurate forecasts may reach up to 20 cents from every earned dollar.

Matei Stratan and his team built a multi-purpose platform that employs ML and AI to provide accurate forecasts and save significant amounts of money for energy operators. Interestingly, the plug-and-play platform can be deployed both on premises and in cloud (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure).

Ogre AI is currently fundraising with the purpose of accelerating the sales effort. Further ambition includes expanding to water and heating.

Other honored finalists were:

• CulturePulse – Slovakian AI assistant for social media posts
• DeRISK – Lithuanian financial risk management assistant
• Ender Turing – Tallinn-based developer of AI-powered voicebots for sales
• HearMe – Polish app-based provider of corporate mental healthcare (which ITKeyMedia covered)
• Magma – Lithuanian provider of collaborative browser-based professional drawing software and art project management solution
• Salesforge – Estonian AI-powered all-in-one sales assistant
• V-ART – Ukrainian blockchain protocol for IP licensing