Forum, Good for Business, Innovations, Latvia, Technology

TechChill has been a place for startups to gather and meet investors for already nine years now, and every year fifty of those startups get a chance to take the main stage of the conference during the pitch competition Fifty Founders Battle to present their ideas in front of the jury, investors, media and all 2300 attendees. During the first day of TechChill 2020 on February 20 all fifty pitch competition semifinalists presented their ideas to investor jury on the Founder stage, and the jury, therefore, selected five finalists to compete in the finals on February 21. The five finalists were Adact (Estonia), a startup that enables brands to create game-based marketing campaigns without coding; HUGO.legal (Estonia), A.I. powered marketplace of lawyers with a goal to male access to justice possible; Longeneze (Latvia), platform that provides transformation of biomedical data into shareable assets; woola (Estonia), startup that creates bubble wrap made out of sheep wool; EVOestate (Estonia), a real estate crowdfunding aggregator.

Estonian woola was announced as this year’s winners to be awarded the main prize of 10 000 EUR from TechChill Foundation, no equity or strings attached. Furthermore, woola also gets fast-tracked to the Startup World Cup finals in San Francisco taking place in April 2020, as well as 10 000 USD worth of AWS credits. 100 000 EUR total soft commitment by a syndicate of Latvian Business Angel Network LatBAN was awarded to Adact, Hugo.legal, VeritaCel.

“Woola made the best pitch, and has potential to make the most impact on the planet if they can deliver this product at scale,” shares TechChill foundation board member Andris K. Berzins.

This year all Fifty Founders Battle finalists were divided into 5 verticals - MedTech, GreenTech, FinTech, B2B, and B2C. TechChill 2020 organizers inform that 2020 sets a record number of applications received - in a total of 261. The most popular vertical was the B2B with 80 applications. As predicted the most applications were sent from such regions as Baltics and Nordics, but as the event becomes more and more international every year, organizers were very happy to see Australia, Kosovo, Puerto Rico, Gambia, Armenia, and more countries represented. This year the applications were sent in from 37 countries in total, indicating the global scope of the competition.

The 9th TechChill conference has grown in size and this year gathered more than 2300 participants, which is more than in any of the previous years, attendees came from more than 40 different countries. TechChill 2020 organisers inform that 40% of all conference attendees were international tech-enthusiasts and globally recognized experts. This year the conference also gathered a record-high number of startup pass holders - 500, representing more than 300 different startups. In addition, the conference was attended by over 150 investors and approximately 100 media representatives. Furthermore, the networking platform used at TechChill shows that more than 1500 meetings were held during the conference, but the experience shows there is also a significant number of meetings booked offline at the venue. Alongside the conference, 20 different side events were held, such as Future of Food Hackathon, Riga Venture Summit 2020, FinTech talks with Twino, I am Remarkable workshop by Google, Career Move by Mintos, LMT IoT Hackathon,  and many other outstanding events for all audiences.