Interviews from the European Angel Investment Summit (1/2)
The European Business Angel Network (EBAN) is an organization that brings together business angels from all over Europe. The aim of the organization is to provide a forum for business angels to share best practices and learn from each other. EBAN also offers training for new business angels who want to get involved in startup investing. The organization held one of its two annual conferences in Brussels recently, bringing together business angel investors from all over the continent. This year’s conference was particularly important, as it provided a much-needed opportunity for startup founders to connect with potential investors. With the COVID-19 pandemic causing economic uncertainty, many startups are struggling to secure funding. The conference offered a unique opportunity for startups to pitch their businesses to a large group of potential investors. EBAN director Jacopo Losso spoke about the importance of business angels in the current climate, saying “business angels are more important than ever in these challenging times.”Losso went on to say that business angels “provide the seed funding that is essential for many startups.” The conference was a valuable opportunity for startup founders to meet with potential investors and get their businesses off the ground.
For this event more than 300 seed-stage startups applied, of which they have chosen 25 for the event. The event we attended took place in Brussels. We focused on startups from Germany and made short interviews with them on-site. If you want one or more of these startups back for a full interview, let us know in the comments or via email. The event was a great opportunity to network and exchange ideas with other startup founders, business angels, and VC investors from all across Europe. We also got insights into the early-stage startup scene across the continent and had the chance to listen to some great startup pitches. All in all, it was a very inspiring event that definitely left us wanting more. The next event will take place in Athens, Greece in April 2023. You can apply for the event via the EBAN website: https://www.eban.org/
Publication Schedule
This episode also kicks off our hot fall, where we have two episodes each week, until Christmas. We will finish the year with our annual fintech review on December 25th and be back for you on January 19th, 2023.
Video Podcast
Audio Podcast
Note: Normally we would share our Sounder.fm link here, BUT sounder decided to sunset their hosting offer soon, so we will share the direct audio links here, as soon as we moved to a new hosting service. Until then you can listen on many apps and tools. Find them all here:
Enabler
Hessen Trade and Invest is the enabler of some of the most important interviews that have been conducted for this website. Without their brand, Invest-in-Hessen.com, none of these would have been possible. These interviews would not have been possible without Hessen Trade and Invest’s willingness to help facilitate my travel and connect me with startups in their network.
This Episode
00:00 Introduction
00:16 Welcome by Joe
01:46 Jacopo Losso — Managing Director of the European Business Angel Network — The host of the event https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacopo-losso-62278692/
07:28 Philo Boras — CEO and Co-Founder Aurora Life Sciences — https://www.linkedin.com/in/philo-boras-a8240a143/ Their product is a smart cutting board, recognizing the food, helping especially diabetes patients to automate their nutrition diary and improve their life quality: https://www.aurora-nutrio.com/de/#start
11:36 Nauman Basit — Founder, CEO and CTO of racksnet — https://www.linkedin.com/in/nauman-basit-racksnet/ — racksnet a leading software solution provider for cloud-managed IT networks for single or multi-vendor environments: https://racksnet.com/de/
16:58 Pascal Schmitt — CEO Voxel Sound — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-schmitt-91b712196/ — Voxel Sound offers tailored in-ear headphones which can be worn for hours and track vital sign data: https://voxel-sound.com/
20:35 Stephane Ruiz — European Enterprise Network (EEN) — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaneruiz/ — The EEN is a network of more than 2.000 experts across 60 countries https://een.ec.europa.eu/
Topics discussed in this episode:
Diabetes, health tech, MedTech, network, cisco, corporate network, computer networks, headphones, tailored headphones, customized hearable, wearable devices, vital signs, pulse, o2 saturation, heart rate, body temperature, European Enterprise Network, business angel, business angel association, European business angels, hiring, jobs, startups, startups looking for employees, employment, access to finance, access to investors, pitch, investor pitch, pitch preparation, pitching investors
Automated Transcript
Introduction
[0:00] Music.
[0:08] That I owe you were podcast and YouTube blog covering the German.
[0:13] Music.
Welcome By Joe
[0:21] Hey guys this is Joe from startuprad.io today we are bringing you a special episode this will actually kick off our hot fall where we have to.
[0:34] Episodes each week for you until Christmas this is the first episode
of our trip to Brussels something we have not done for quite some time
attending events and doing the life and do use there is of course some background noise the audio and video quality is not
what you are used to but that’s also I do believe part of the charm of attending a life event we have been
gift of the European business Angel Network Eben in Brussels at the European Angel investment Summit and event,
pretty much for early-stage proceed seat Investments where these startups actually can connect
to load of business angels,
directly we hope you’re going to enjoy those interviews sponsored by invest in hessen,
let me know what you think and look forward to two episodes each week from now on until Christmas.
Jacopo Losso — Managing Director Of The European Business Angel Network
[1:53] Hey guys this time I have jacobo here with me who is the.
Managing director of the European business angels Network.
Can you tell us how many angels are organized in this organization yes absolutely so even is a straight body but it’s actually a net,
next said business angels,
all of Europe we have over 100 business Angel clubs Affiliated to the even community and and that reaches out to a an even larger base of investors of over 10,000 business angels part of the Ebon.
[2:29] And to do these events on a regular,
twice a year we host big events this one is the the European Angel investment Summit it takes place every year in Brussels in the fall we’re super happy,
how the event has been going and working with our friends also in Germany in the hessen trade and invest the in this in this event.
[2:53] And can you give us a few recommendations what type of investor is this event made for what type of investor does.
For to really attend here so it’s definitely an event intended and made for the business angels and it is an event that is both for newcomers to the angel Community as well as veterans and.
Why because at the Eben Summit newcomers can learn the so-called best practices on how to invest in startups,
from others part of this community they can be inspired by the work of others and of course they can connect and build a relationship.
That will ultimately be needed when they continue their investment Journey over overtime,
for those that are more experienced investors is it a fantastic place to connect internationally and build bonds with other investors in different parts of Europe and it’s a great way to do to start doing more and more,
border Angel investment deal so that’s why this event is really for all Angel Investors newer and and more.
Terms of investors would it also make sense for like International investors looking at series a series B to talk to business angel.
[4:14] Over or co-invest in their.
Absolutely this is also an event that attracts a lot of venture capital investors and corporate investors it why because there’s a lot of Angel companies that are their portfolio companies that are now scaling and growing and we put them on stage here at the even,
in a competition called the even scale-up of the month,
and that is really where we showcase companies raising fall on ground or a series a round to the later stage investment community so it’s intended really also,
Avicii crowd in the forefoot.
[4:47] And in terms of entrepreneurs what what kind of entrepreneurs should attend this event I would get something like greasy.
So if you are an entrepreneur and you’re raising your seed round and and also your late seed round this is definitely the event for you we’ve had the pleasure of selecting,
companies that are 317 that have applied to this event and we given them the opportunity,
present themselves and then network with the investors and host one-to-one meetings with the with the angels that are walking around here at the summit so it’s definitely an event that is intended for companies that are raising,
their first rounds and until I would say the series a funding.
And we already talked with Nikolaus about how to project investors here basically it’s pretty simple you can book meeting.
What should you do to prepare and as we already said with Nikolaus don’t torture them in the first 15 minutes meeting with the eighth.
[5:55] That doesn’t work it’s.
How does it work here so it works like more or less every other place so if you’re an entrepreneur prepare that elevator pitch extremely well,
focus on the delivery of your pitch and how complete it is at the same time balance it also in terms of,
the length of it Angels at this event easily.
50 60 different companies their time is rather limited we do have plenty of breaks and moments in the agenda to,
let’s say the shorter and sweeter you keep it the better chance that angel will be attracted to you and and maybe asking you for a longer meeting then in the days that follow.
[6:42] Sounds good you talked about there’s one event in the fall that we just attended.
The other way so that’s our annual even Congress it takes place every year in a different European country next year we’re preparing to host it in Athens Greece on the 24th 25th.
Of April so Mark those dates on your calendars and we’re looking forward to seeing you as angels as VCS but also as entrepreneurs in.
In April at the.
And down here in the show notes we link the website where people can learn more absolutely it’s even dot-org and you can find out all about our events or activities how to join the Eben Community there and we hope to welcome you soon at the next page.
Thank you very much for the interview likewise pleasure.
Philo Boras — Ceo And Co-Founder Aurora Life Sciences
[7:39] I have another guest here this time Philo from new Trail,
can you briefly introduce yourself to our audience yes of course thanks for having me my name is Phil oh I’m one of the founders of Aurora and we developed the product neutral over the course of the last four years.
[7:56] And can you tell us what new Trio is yeah most people want to know this yuichiro is the world’s first truly smart cutting board so it’s a smart combination of wooden cutting board kitchen scale and the sensor platform with a touchscreen interface.
So when you put food on it usually automatically recognizes the food gives you the weight and all the nutritional facts of this food and when you’re done with cooking it just pushes save button and mutual saves everything to the new Trio app and you have a fully automated nutrition diary.
That sounds interesting but are there any use cases for that of course,
and the world we have more than 500 million diabetics and the European Union alone we’re spending more than 150 billion euros per year to treat these people.
And in fact 45% of them could be treated without medication just by Healthy nutrition and some moderate exercise so going for a walk regulary and eating healthy does the trick for them,
these people have to do the fishing tracking every day so they’re keeping a nutrition diary by putting everything on kitchen scales measuring it and then writing it down in their nutrition diary to calculate the nutrients and we want to make it easy for them so this is an automatic process now with neutral,
that’s all them have to work anymore.
[9:07] And what is your target like for the first for the first client you looking at diabetes patients only only in Germany or what is your target audience at the first step.
Basically we have to.
Target groups the first group is Optimizer so people that want to lose some pounds or want to gain muscle or want to be performed in sports or in their job.
This is these are people’s we call optimizers on the other hand we have people with diabetes or chronic cardiovascular diseases,
need to control their disease and so for have to keep the nutrition diary and we’re starting with the with the lifestyle group because these are power users so people that are really intrinsic motivated to do this.
And we use them as multipliers for later.
And we are also building Partnerships with health insurance has to make sure that a lot of people that really need new tree or like diabetics so on have access to neutral even if they can’t afford it.
[10:06] That would have been my next question are you currently.
How will you be available in the future as kind of prescription so that health insurance covers the board.
We’re planning to do this so that people that really need something like Nursery or can access it without having to buy a pay all the fees for the product and so control their disease in more easier way.
How far are you in your startup Journey right now where would you sell yourself consider,
proceed start up at the Monitor and sit stage so we have to all the problems having done the moment transferring to Serious production and we launched neutral in the beginning of next year.
And I are raising our seed fund at the moment I see so you’re open to talk to investors yes absolutely.
We’re looking for office institution around at the moment you already have commitments here and we’re looking for corner stores how useful do you find this event so far.
That’s pretty cool because we have the possibility to connect to a lot of new people talking to a lot of people about our products and spread the word about it and as we nice to network via.
I see are you currently hiring yes of course we are looking for developers at the moment.
Because we are digital platforms so who lead a lot of developers like everyone else and yes we are hiring.
[11:30] Great looking forward to hearing more from Lee thank you very much for the interview thanks for having me.
Nauman Basit — Founder, Ceo And Cto Of Racksnet
[11:45] Hey and here’s our next guest at the business Angel Summit in Brussels can you introduce yourself Norman hi there my name is Norman bosses.
I’m one of the cofounders of racksnet Rex that is,
multi-vendor Network automation platform and we are German based tech company and we here in the summer.
And the interesting part how did you get this idea where does it come from.
So where does this idea come from so basically I’ve been in this industry for more than 20 years I started at Cisco work for HP,
for a couple of years and our customers always had these issues of dwell vendors or multi-vendor environment,
and we knew that most of the times when there’s like Cisco each.
They have their own management solution but there was wasn’t hardly any solution the market which has covered the Cisco’s HP Dell Siemens and so on.
So we came up with the idea to have an umbrella management platform on top of all these vendors are no code solution so that means you spend a lot of time coding all these different routers switches access.
And what what was one of the key reasons to develop the solution was.
[13:07] Customers now can deploy manage their networks within few minutes instead of,
employment which usually takes a couple of days so less time more resources and no errors actually while configuring all these complex.
[13:24] Question how much time do your customers safe with this no code solution yeah so how much time does our customers save energy solutions.
[13:34] The average amount of time usually when you deploy a network takes a couple of days it can be three days five days.
[13:41] With our zero-touch provisioning with our tools and features which we have built in their customers can deploy their networks within 10 to 20 minutes,
so as you can see this is a huge time win for the network operation teams which they can use them for others,
father thinks it and my understanding from our discussion before is you can also,
to combine different tools different different producers different Hardware producers together in the network yeah,
yeah so the network industry usually has some,
major there’s some major winners in the industry so we have like the Cisco we have the H PDF there we have War why we have now in the iot networks we recently working with Siemens also for iot Networks,
to combine the it notable,
now as you know that Cisco engineer might take years to graduate to master all these,
command lines and configuration tasks,
what we did is with a no code solution that we allowed to this platform to be when they’re,
so it’s more agnostic and we do all the translation of these commands between the vendors the interoperability with a single platform with a single unified graphical user.
[15:07] Where are you users from what’s the usual industry of your clientele.
[15:12] So where does our users usually come from so our customers are medium Enterprises large in the price but also corporate,
we have customers in the public government areas as well as industry,
because everywhere networks are everywhere we have them at home but whenever you look at companies where they have like hundreds or thousands of network devices,
you need to have a management layer on top of that so you can roll out deploy things manage your whole corporate networks you know you might have facilities in Germany in the US and Asia.
That’s why our customers are mainly the medium sized Enterprises large corporate in this area,
and to your here today to look for investors.
[16:01] So what are we doing here today so we are looking for two things first of all for good partners obviously we want to expand our running business now outside of Germany,
and obviously the other thing is we want to start our with with talents,
and for that obviously we also need investment you kind of took my next question already away you’re currently hiring what roles are you looking for.
So mainly people who have their different roles which we are right now looking for an hour for employee so basically it’s software development,
the web application but also in the back end we are looking for Network engineers and we have a brand new division for AI and machine learning.
Great so best of luck foot before your future Journey thank you very much thank you and all the best guys.
Pascal Schmitt — Ceo Voxel Sound
[17:08] Hello and welcome can you introduce yourself to our audience hello I’m Pascal I’m one of the co-founder of voxel sound and we bring you the customized horrible.
[17:19] Oh that sounds interesting one question I’d front would you consider yourself healthy,
tool or something for the audio into the East so we are considering first of the sports market so we track white Ensign data but in the future we’re going into Medical Health Data because the sensor data given out of the ear region,
is very very good.
[17:45] I was wondering that sounds like a normal in ear Bluetooth luck what is different about your,
different is that we customize each individual product from the customer with a smartphone scanning app so you scan your ear in around one minute per year then we adopted in an automated process so we can build scalable,
in your house phone.
[18:11] I also understand you can also or you want to connect collect data from the Interlock in the future.
Yeah we track a lot of data from the ear so as an example everybody know the data and gain from the Smartwatch the problem with that is that it’s the first a lot who have the movement and with the Sun the reflection,
from the watch and then the original it’s a lot better data quality so we use that data quality to track pulse pulse,
O2 saturation and blood pressure and also any of them on.
[18:49] Uh-huh that sounds interesting and in the future you can use it for complete health monitor yeah in the future we’re playing so so every one of our sensor is usable in health device but of course it needs the the.
Uh-huh I see and when I wear headphones in here over time it starts to hurt a little bit is the different with your,
yeah with all product there the hurt is no problem because every product is fitted to each individual customer with the scaling up,
and so there is no falling out there is no pain in wearing and there’s a that’s a completely different situation.
I see where are you right now in your startup Journey,
now we are in the final prototype realization of our durable and we bring in the next few months our NDP on the market so it’s a customized hearing protection and the wired wired in your house,
in the future next year we plan to bring our product to the horrible itself to the market that by our Kickstarter.
[19:56] And so basically you are also I would assume in looking for investors right now Lucas.
That is why you usually hear what are you looking for in terms of seed stage.
Well looking forward to 1.2 million euro for the development of the hearable ante up and therefore we’re searching for an investor.
[20:19] Are you also currently hiring we are searching for different persons marketing software development and so on.
[20:31] Thank you very much for the interview thanks for your time.
Stephane Ruiz — European Enterprise Network (Een)
[20:44] Hello and welcome everybody this is Joe from the business angels Summit again coming to you this time I do have the fun here with me hey can you introduce yourself a little bit to our.
Hello I’m a stiff and riff from the Enterprise Road Network.
The interpretation of that network is the world’s biggest Network that supports smes and startups worldwide.
We are a network with more than 2,000 expert in more than 60 countries and we support.
Access to finance and scale-up services our.
To with ambition with International missions to reach International markets and get.
And if a startups or scale up here this right now what would they need to do in order to get to those services and.
[21:40] It’s quite easy to get in contact with Enterprise Europe Network expert because you only need to go to the website.
Of the Enterprise Network and contact your local.
Point there are as I said before 2000 3000 expert where you can contact whenever you want,
and request and expand your needs access to finance for example and you will have insightful advice.
On how to get financed how to prepare your peaches.
To go to the best investment forums like this one where we are today which is the European Angel investment.
Organized by Yvonne which is the European Business Center Network in collaboration with the European commission and our Network and what kind of services,
can the startups and scale up.
You’ve talked about access to finance pitch preparation International markets what what is what is like a broad overview of what startups and scale.
[22:51] Yes we have a quite broad portfolio of services.
Depending also on the expertise of each in member which starts from investment Readiness assessment.
Beach revision,
dry runs which is to make a rehearsal of the pigeon front of many of many expert just to to repeat your pitch and make a perfect picture in front of investors,
and also.
Reviewing the business plan and different services like this one and with what is also very important is to review the business model which is invertible and.
And how long would such a process.
And public bodies do have a reputation for being a little bit slower can you give them a time scale for example I know right now a lot of startups are looking.
More funding what is the time frame they can expect until they are done with your assistance for finance what the assistant for pitching and how long does it.
[24:06] Well the provision of services is quite immediate in a sense that we don’t need to follow a process like a grant provision.
So the services can be delivered depending on the on the on how fast the entrepreneur make the its own works because we work as a coaches and providing assessments and homeworks but it depends on the,
on how the entrepreneurs.
Dude eat their homeworks and normally for an investment round it took six to nine month to,
to prepare it to make to prepare the all the paperwork’s the homeworks the investment decks and also a to visit and Dakota investment forums and have meetings in batches is not two months work it’s longer.
[25:00] One question you’ve just talked about finances do you get any impression right now in the current situation does it get harder for startups and scale UPS to raise money from private sources or is it about the same as before.
[25:15] Well the last reports for example in Spain where I’m based is that the venture capital investment continue to grow.
But it’s true that the current situation makes very volatile the and valuations of the companies,
are being a bit hindering during the last.
But the money is still there and growing and I think there’s plenty of opportunities for a start-up and scallions prepared to be.
[25:51] Thank you one last question how much do you charge for their services.
Een services are for free because they are calm financed by the European commission through the single Market program and by the first organizations that we are mainly Innovations agencies,
Chamber of Commerce at University which has many public so the service is highly valued and for free.
Great and everybody would like to learn more they can go down here in the show notes there will be a link to You European Enterprise Network een where they can learn more and thank you very much.
[26:28] Music.
