NMA goes NYC — Christoph Hüning — Medium
At the next media accelerator (NMA) our focus is to work with startups from all over Europe and connect them with the German-speaking media industry. As our 30 fund investors are media companies, press agencies or digital agencies from Germany and Austria we promise our portfolio teams to cover a market size of 100 m people. Especially teams from smaller European countries foster through this scaling possibility.
Once the teams are ready to grow further, the next logical step is to enter the US as the biggest global market for journalism, media and marketing. We are happy that the first NMA teams managed to enter this development stage already (e.g. Contentflow, Spectrm). And when aiming at the US media industry, we are not looking to the Silicon Valley as many other industries but strongly see NYC as “the place to be”.
For the second year in a row (we call it a tradition now!) NMA hosted our own “media match” format in New York City. This time we brought 10 teams from different European countries and presented them to NYC based media executives and investors:
AdBooker (Norway): Platform for programmatic media buying
Aiconix (Germany): AI based analysis and production of online video content
Attention Insight (Lithuania): AI platform for user attention monitoring
Coverstories (The Netherlands): Branded stories made beautiful for mobile
Frameright (Finland): Image cropping for all platforms
IndieFrame (Denmark): “The algorithm of the people”
LAMA (Austria): Interviews as a service
Lytt (Norway): Podcast platform for publishers
Sceenic (UK): “watch together” SaaS technology
Tonio (Austria): Tone with information
10 European media startups ready to reach out for the US market (Photo credit: Cary Davis)
The first evening brought a public pitch event. All teams performed extremely well and left an excellent impression to the audience of appr. 60 visitors. On day 2 our teams participated in an intense workshop format with three panels behind closed doors. With panelists from companies as Wall Street Journal, Betaworks VC, R/GA Ventures, Bonnier Ventures or Opinary to name a few, the input range was as broad as possible. Every participating team had the chance to practice their pitch experience, get feedback on their product and business model and bring up own questions to market insiders. As we practice the “Chatham House Rules” in this meetings, no further details can be shared but we are extremely happy with the results of our NYC trip and already started planning the next steps to deepen our connections.
Finally, NMA would not be able to do this event without help from our friends. We are happy to thank the NYC Media Lab as well the German Accelerator for their support and hospitality and look forward to many more common events and activities! And as this trip was the final step in our participation within the Sequencer Tour we would like to thank the Federal Foreign Office for their support and engagement with the Wunderbar Together campaign.
Originally published by Christoph Hüning at https://medium.com on July 9, 2019.
