Hi, reader. Today I'll tell you what I saw at Seedstars summit CEE 2019 in Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan. So, first of all let me tell you(in case you don't know) about Seedstars startup summit.
Seedstars World is a part of the Swiss group Seedstars and runs the global startup competition covering 65+ emerging and developing markets. Their mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through the promotion and investment in entrepreneurship and technology.
It's important to know that Seedstars is annual program. First part are the local competitions between startups. Seedstars Yerevan, or Kiyv, or anywhere else… 80+ local competitions during the year. Then the winners all of this local countries coming to Regional Summit. Seedstars manages 5 Regional summits where they bring all Seedstars World local winners of each region, as well as speakers, investors, corporates, incubators, accelerators, goverments and relevant stakeholders to one city (this happened in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan) to build bridges between regional ecosystems and discuss the regional challenges. In this part of Seedstars World the startupers from the region in 3 minutes trying to introduce their startup` business model, how they earn money, their needs in business, ideas of future etc..In this spot startups compete to represent their region at Seedstars Global Summit in Switzerland.
The competition's final happens in the Seedstars Summit in Switzerland, an exciting event filled with breakout sessions, panel discussions, specialized workshops and the best minds from emerging markets, where the regional winners compete to be crowned the Seedstars World Global Winner.
And let's start from title- What I saw at Seedstars Regional competition.. So it happened on 20-22 November in Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan the second coldest capital in the world.. But the cold is nothing when all of this happened in such worm atmosphere. The 19 startups had 3 mins to pitch their startups - how they are going to rise their startup on other countries, what they are going to do to get well known all over the world, how they earn money.....The orientations of startups were very different- education, transport and travel, fintech, health tech, sport etc... Our Armenian startup Velvioo/YerevanRide was presented by co-founder Alex Baghdjian. In 3 mins Alex told why they need money, what they are going to do with it and after than we spoke about YerevanRide in detail. YerevanRide is Yerevan's first bicycle sharing program wich was founded by Albert Manukyan and Alex Baghdjian.
Alex told that he was living in New York and had met Albert in this city.Then this two guys desided to make some great thing together here, in Yerevan. In NY city it's normal to get to workplace or university by bycicle but in Yerevan at that time we didn't have this opportunity for the one reason, we had no companies which propose this service.
So now we can rent a bycicle and have a tour around Yerevan. Now they have about 3000 active users and the number of users still is growing very fast. And it is the motivation for this two to continue doing in other countries what they are doing in our Yerevan. They need money for it. And that's why the guys took part in local competition and then after winning they came to Nur-Sultan for the second victory. Now armenian Startup YerevanRide is going to Swizerland in april with 7 others.
Alex Bahgfjian YerevanRide co-founder
The winners are.
Lingwing.com (Georgia)
Biometric (Kazakhstan)
iHotel LLC (Mongolia)
StudyFree (Russia)
FOM (Uzbekistan)
Jeff (Latvia)
Velvioo (Armenia)
SkyWorker (Ukraine)
After all the organizers gave the press conference.
Eugenia Shevchenko, the Summit Manager said that .
“We are so proud to have with us startups from 15 countries with such innovative
ideas and contagious energy. This Summit week was the opportunity for them to
acquire qualitative knowledge from our dedicated mentors and confront their
business models with investors. Months of work leading up to quite an experience,
reuniting an international community around the CEE tech scene,”.
Seedstars startup summit CEE 2019 now is history. The guys are preparing to partisipate in Seedstars Global. Hope the one winner of this year will be our YerevanRide but anyway good luck to everyone.