The final of the AFAS Young Business Award is about choices, impact, capacity for growth and extremely difficult jury deliberations. But it worked again. We have a winner!
Actually, we have four winners. After all, the finalists of the AFAS Young Business Award all won their preliminary round. And now they get to compete again for the final grand prize: interviews with and guidance from some of the most important investor clubs in the Netherlands. With an obvious result: an injection of capital and knowledge into their scale-up.
It's choosing between apples and oranges for the jury. What do you put more emphasis on? When it comes to technology, drone builder Avy should win. Are you more about a fair future of clothing production? Then Textracer is victorious. For smart tech to bring furniture directly from factory to customer, Naduvi is the place to be. If you go for a platform to trade used furniture, Reliving carries away your preference.
To determine who is "the best of the best," a largely new-name jury interviews the finalists. Know more, crack on further is the motto. Gemma Bloemen (Creandum) wants to know from Naduvi-founder Itai Gross what makes his concept so unique. The answer: ,,We have no stock, no warehouse. We deliver directly on demand. So we can grab a higher margin and the risks are lower.''
Super-smart marketing
One wonders as a viewer how it could sustain that if Naduvi were to scale to much larger proportions. Biggest risk for this scale-up is undoubtedly the return policy. Gross is a gifted persuader, but also has trouble explaining what he does with returns when asked by Thomas Hendriks (The Entrepreneur). ''We pick up the couch and make sure he gets a nice solution.'' Which exactly, remains unclear.
That's different with Reliving, as that platform primarily facilitates trade between buyers and sellers of used furniture. Ananda van Doorn - as nice to listen to as ever - thinks her scale-up can achieve Unicorn status. Heleen Dura-Van Oord (Peak Capital & Vivid Ventures) mainly wonders how then, especially with relatively low margins. The answer: super-smart marketing, plus the buy-and-sell model, which guarantees an endless supply (of margin).
Marco Aarnink (Print.com) asks the question on the lips of all of us: what makes Reliving different from Marketplace? Ananda van Doorn gives the right answer: ,,The experience. With us it feels like buying something new. No agreements that are not kept, no excessively low bids, no fraud, no scams.''
The Airbus of the drone industry. That is the ambition of Patrique Zaman of Avy. Which splashes off the screen by the way, full of ambition and conviction. His Avy remains a wondrous story. ,,We have the only drone aircraft that flies completely autonomously. We are now flying in Africa and controlling that from Amsterdam. We have built the drone in a modular way, so we can adapt and expand it all the time, for example to carry more weight.''
Cuddliness
Avy's cuddliness factor is huge. The scale-up only lets the drones fly to help people. Flying blood and AEDs around, for example, or discovering forest fires and drowning people. When jury chairman Bas van der Veldt asks about how it goes about its business in an emergency, as a viewer you know for sure: Avy is going to win. ,,The notification to the control room enters our system, the nearest drone takes off and, using numerous systems, including GPS and detection to avoid other aircraft, flies to where it needs to be. Completely
autonomous.''
Jolanda Kooi of Textracer has a good story. She is going to lead the textile industry towards sustainability. By visualizing the entire chain, she can show companies what can be done even better to save the environment and improve social conditions. Presenter Jörgen Raymann (or rather his wife) may have the best price. She wants to know if the low-cost clothing brands are up for this and what it means for consumer prices. Jolanda Kooi: ''For 0.03 percent of the value of a product, we collect all the data.'' Which of course leaves the question of whether those clothing chains will bite.
It will have to come from consumers. They can make a more conscious choice if, thanks to Textracer, it becomes clear how their clothing is manufactured. If the consumer goes for conscious, the industry will automatically follow, is the idea. That assumption is probably correct, for an increasing portion of the population. The question remains when the large bulk of textile suppliers and their customers will be ready. A very nice concept, with a nice platform including blockchain, but is the moment already here, or is Textracer still a little too early?
Putting everything together, there can really only be one winner from this edition of the AFAS Young Business Award. And that winner will come. Because if you manage to comply with extremely strict regulations, design and build complex technology yourself, operate in a unique market and also make a big impact, then you are the best. Avy is it. Remember that name.
Finalists AFAS Young Business Award
Naduvi unlocks furniture from renowned brands. These come directly from the supplier to the customer. That saves money and emissions, promise founder Itai Gross and his hundred employees. The thick 18 million in investment money says that promise will be kept.
Ananda van Doorn and Jody Klaassen built a marketplace for used furniture and vintage from Amsterdam. Already, 30,000 people are offering furniture pieces on the platform Reliving, which is an answer to consumerism and throwing away usable items.
With Amsterdam-based Avy, Patrique Pi Zaman and now more than 50 employees are working toward his dream: building zero-emission, self-flying aircraft to be used for humanitarian purposes.
Also in Amsterdam, Tex Tracer is working to change the fashion world. Jolanda Kooi started the startup, which offers insight into fashion's supply chain to better match supply and demand. And that's good news for the planet.