The Young Business Award is (almost) back! This Friday (January 15) you can watch the first episode of the YBA Broadcast. Which startup convinces the jury with their 60-second pitch and who will eventually become the best young business in the Netherlands?
This year's season of the Young Business Award consists of 4 TV episodes. The first three episodes are the preliminary rounds. In these, twelve semi-finalists try to convince the judges that their startup is going to be a unicorn. Each startup gets 60 seconds to convince the judges with their pitch. And that certainly doesn't go smoothly for every startup. When the 60 seconds are up, presenter Jort Kelder intervenes immediately. It is then up to the jury to get to the bottom of each startup with a barrage of questions. Only the four best startups receive a final ticket from the jury.
The startups with a final ticket return during the fourth episode: the finals of the Young Business Award 2020. During the final episode, the four finalists will compete against each other. A new jury takes office and the winner of this episode returns home with the coveted crystal award. The winner may call himself "Best Young Business of the Netherlands" for one year and receives the prize pool of 15,000 euros.
YBA Broadcast
YBA Broadcast episode 1:
Friday, January 15 at noon
Participants: CodeSandbox | Save Your Package | Spacetime Layers | Sustainer Homes
YBA Broadcast episode 2:
Friday, January 22 at 12:00 p.m.
Participants: Bidroom | Quicargo | Flow Money Automation | Greener Power Solutions
YBA Broadcast episode 3:
Friday, January 29 at 12:00 p.m.
Participants: Felyx | LipoCoat | Tykn | Klippa
YBA Broadcast episode 4:
Friday, Feb. 5 at noon
Finalists will be selected during the first three episodes.
Participants
CodeSandbox
With their GoogleDocs for programmers, the very young entrepreneurs Ives van Hoorne and Bas Buursma already raised $15 million in growth money from investors in recent years. As students, they stomped CodeSandbox out of their dorm room in 2019. The fast-growing startup now has more than two million developers worldwide on their platform. CodeSandbox can count companies such as Microsoft and Shopify among their customers.
Save Your Package
Sam Rohn stomped his startup Save Your Package out of his frustration with the poor service of parcel delivery companies. He decided in 2016 that this could be better: a package delivery company that gets products to customers for (web) retailers within a day and also offers reliable communication. Today, through Sam, this service is also available to the very smallest retailers.
Spacetime Layers
When former teacher Patrick Trentelman tells people about his startup, he invariably gets the question, "And this wasn't there yet? Trentelman developed the initial idea for his Spacetime Layers in his elementary school classroom: from multiple sources of information to everything in the same place. A platform that links location to information worldwide. The content depends on its users: Spacetime provides the place; organizations fill it with content.
Sustainer Homes
Worldwide, the construction of homes and buildings accounts for over a third of global CO2 emissions. A major drain on our planet. Sustainer Homes developed a kind of LEGO for building homes. It can be used to easily design row houses, apartments or villas. With a smart software package, the design is translated into a simple building package, similar to those of IKEA. This package is assembled in a factory and within one day the building is assembled on site. In this way, the startup contributes to a better environment and the reduction of CO2 emissions worldwide.
Bidroom
A hotel booking platform, but slightly different. At Bidroom, no commission for hotels, but membership for travelers. Now offering more than 150,000 hotels in over 120 countries. Hotels that, because they pay no commission, are willing to give up to 25 percent discount on an overnight stay. Founder Michael Ros' startup already has more than 90 employees and offices in Amsterdam, Krakow, Turkey, Barcelona and Paris. Acclaimed in the travel industry and awarded a World Tourism Forum Award, among others. Plug & Play chose Bidroom to join their growth program in Silicon Valley, America.
Quicargo
Because half of all trucks travel partially or completely empty on the road, there are unnecessarily many on the road. Bad for the environment, in other words. Predictability of transport planning is also becoming increasingly difficult due to increasing web sales and same day delivery. That can be done better, thought Quicargo. The platform brings real-time supply and demand together. With a single click, carriers have access to shipments that are on their route. Load factor is thus increased, companies can deliver quickly and flexibly and fewer trucks need to be on the road.
Flow Money Automation
How do you keep track of your money when you only have one bank account? Keeping a grip is difficult, Flow Money Automation founders Daan van Klinken and Niels Mulder learned. Flow helps you get that grip: by automatically dividing money into savings goals and budgets. This automatically gives you better insight into how much you can still spend on groceries, for example. In order to obtain the necessary permit from the Dutch Central Bank, Flow has already raised an investment of 600,000 euros.
Greener Power Solutions
Power in places where there is no grid connection? Often it comes from polluting diesel generators. With their mega-batteries, Greener Power Solutions wants to prevent that. The system provides construction sites, festivals and offshore locations, for example, with sustainably generated power. In two years, the startup became the global market leader in rentals and has already completed three investment rounds. In addition, Greener Power Solutions develops smart software for remote operation and prediction of power usage.
Felyx
In many a city in the Netherlands, including Groningen, Felyx's dark green, electric shared scooters are on the road. Founders Quinten Selhorst and Maarten Poot started the company in 2015 to drive the mobility transition. Not only because cities are becoming increasingly crowded and air quality is deteriorating, but also because it is important to get from A to B quickly and in an affordable way. A shared scooter is the best solution for this, they argue. Tens of thousands of Felyx users have already saved 350 tons of CO2 emissions. To compare: that is almost 2,500 flights from Amsterdam to Paris.
LipoCoat
Over 7 billion euros a year cost infections caused by medical devices. 110,000 people even die from them. LipoCoat, a spin-off from the University of Twente, was the first in the world to develop toxic-free, antibacterial coatings that reduce the risk of infection by 95 percent. In addition to medical devices, LipoCoat also stepped into the contact lens, catheter and prosthetics markets. Jasper van Weerd's startup was already awarded European Biotech Startup of the Year in 2019.
Tykn
Anyone who loses their identity documents such as a birth certificate no longer exists on paper. With Tykn's solution, you'll never lose them again. The startup built an application on blockchain technology on which identification documents are stored. A kind of digital passport that records the existence of documents. For example, refugees, who leave their hearth and home headlong in harsh conditions, never lose their proof of existence again. This keeps them as likely as others, in a world where identities are portable, in a shielded, secure, accessible place.
Klippa
Do you also have a shoebox full of receipts and other paperwork? Documents that you have to process by hand into one digital solution. That could be smarter, thought the founders of Klippa. They started digitizing expense claims from business service providers in 2015. Upload a photo and done; no data retyping. The startup uses text recognition by machine learning. Since then, the solution has expanded to include accounting links and Klippa processes all business owners' procurement streams.