ReaktorX is a pre-acceleration program for startups at the earliest stage of development. The target group is beginner entrepreneurs, ideally professionals in their fields, with an idea for a product or service that would disrupt the industry.
Over one hundred startups applied for the second edition of the program last autumn. On Monday, 29th January, eleven best teams presented their projects after ten weeks of intensive acceleration. Interest in demo night was huge, and a queue of investors lined up in front of Hub Hub’s co-working center. The auditorium, bursting at the seams, had to host over two hundred business angels, representatives of venture capital funds and corporations.
After a series of difficult questions for entrepreneurs, the international jury chose the winner – Fasadio, created by Magdalena Sobczyńska. Magda is an architect and together with Piotr Szybilski has been running her studio for several years. Recently she noticed that she is getting more and more orders for house facade projects. It turns out it is a poorly developed market, dominated by expensive architects and cheap, but not necessarily professional, design majors. With this in mind, she created a service that connects house builders with designers who provide visualizations, estimate the cost of investment and suggest materials for the project. Fasadio wins thanks to the automation of the customer service process and its scale. It only takes a few days for Fasadio to finalize a project that the competition needs weeks for!
“In Fasadio, I appreciate especially its freshness, market potential, current traction and the simplicity of the idea”, says Inga Kasak, managing director of the Black Swan Fund, a member of the jury – “and the fact that the founder is a woman, which is still not common in the startup environment – and what the Black Swan Fund supports – confirmed my choice.”
Not only the jury but also the audience voted for the best startup during the demo night. The popular vote was won by the NebulaNetwork project, represented on the stage by the blockchain programmer Paweł Cichocki. Nebula creates a huge distributed computation cloud, which aims to compete with the products of the market leaders like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. The advantage of Nebula is the “multichain” technology, a new blockchain-inspired way of storing data. Some of the technological solutions used in the project are currently awaiting a patent in the USA. Paweł has already managed to collect over 100k EUR for his business, and soon everyone will be able to invest in the project thanks to the collection of money in the popular ICO format.
Not only the eventual winners were able to entertain the crowds. Jakub Zygmunt, the founder of Dollarro, made a sensational pitch at the demo night. During his presentation, the audience was bursting out laughing every moment like it was the best stand-up comedy show. Sinup – a project that turns your sins into money for charity – was an entertaining surprise as well. The list of allstartups presenting their ideas at the event can be found on the ReaktorX website.
The second edition of ReaktorX is over, but the team has already announced the next edition is coming up this Spring. Interested startups should apply to the program at reaktorx.com.
Former CEO of ITKeyMedia / Deserted:)
