We have always had exceptional interest in our Mini Seedcamps in Berlin, which is why we’ve decided to host 2 full Seedcamp weeks in Berlin this year. We are very happy with how the first one turned out, thanks to our partners and friends in Berlin The WYE, BDMI, Factory, our great mentors, our supporters at Osborne Clarke, and all the investors who took part in Demo Day. As always, we’re also more than thankful to our annual sponsors Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Barclays, Qualcomm, PayPal, and Nokia.

Here’s how Seedcamp Week Berlin went, and how we ended up with 4 great new Seedcamp companies.

Applications and Mini Seedcamps

As a result of the new Seedcamp structure with more than 20 Mini Seedcamps around Europe, we had 6 events in various cities throughout April and May. We’re happy about this change – teams we met in Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Belgrade, Istanbul, and Kiev took part in Berlin. Adding individual applications to the overall number, we are now seeing higher quality and depth in applications than ever before. The result was an amazing crowd of 20 teams from 12 countries, working on markets as diverse as transportation, data analysis, and sport fishing. See our post on the announcement of Seedcamp Week Berlin for the full list of teams.

The Big Week

After the usual preparation and presentation training, we spent Mentoring Day at The WYE in Kreuzberg, a cool minimalistic arts and events venue. The teams presented their startups and received much praise – not just on Twitter.

Had a blast mentoring some great teams at @seedcamp today! Keep up the great work everybody. Thx to @factoryberlin for the amazing BBQ!

— Benedikt Lehnert (@blehnert) May 14, 2013

After the teams, Seedcamp mentor Andy Budd of Clearleft took the stage for a master class on design in startups. Besides building one of Europe’s most successful design agencies, Andy also has insights into numerous startups – most recently Clearleft was involved in Matter, which sold to Medium. He talked about the importance of design as a core competitive advantage for startups – not just from a visual, but much more a users’ and customers’ perspective. We want to repeat our words of praise to Andy – the master class was not just insightful and engaging, but also a lot of fun and was referenced by many as a highlight of the day.

The afternoon was spent in mentoring sessions with some of the best entrepreneurs, product builders, and operators of the Berlin and European startup scene. As the sessions have become more focused on operations and product since Demo Day is separated from mentoring, this turned out to be an exhausting afternoon for the teams – intense discussion after discussion for the whole rest of the day.

In the evening, we announced 4 new teams that will be joining the Seedcamp Family and are moving to Campus in London soon. We met 3 of these teams at the Mini Seedcamp events leading up to Seedcamp Week Berlin – supporting our expectations that this new structure would allow us to be closer to entrepreneurs than ever before.

4 New Seedcamp Teams

• Countly, Istanbul, Turkey (joining from Mini Seedcamp Istanbul) – Real-time analytics for mobile applications. The Countly team impressed us not just with a beautiful application and an impressive set of customers – their team is also a crew of real go getters with very relevant experience. We are happy to have the first team from Turkey join us.

• FishBrain, Stockholm, Sweden (Mini Seedcamp Stockholm) – FishBrain helps anglers at all levels catch more and bigger fish and brag about it. Besides offering a compelling service for a huge crowd of passionate anglers, the team behind FishBrain has already reeled in some great cooperations and convinced us with their big ambitions to capture a global market.

• SmartWard, London, UK – SmartWard is a ward management app that reduces human error in hospitals. The unique team made up of an NHS doctor and a successful developer/designer came out of Startup Weekend London – a great sign of the startup world spreading into less obvious areas.

• TruckTrack, Belgrade, Serbia (Mini Seedcamp Belgrade) – The first modern SaaS solution for trucking businesses, a huge, underserved industry. With a family in the trucking industry, highly connected founders, and a grand vision, we couldn’t let TruckTrack go back to Belgrade without a free pass to the Seedcamp world.

The evening of Mentoring Day was concluded by a Barbecue at Factory, a massive co working and office complex for Berlin’s startup scene. The team around Jenny, Sasha, and Simon did all to welcome us and our friends to a fun evening. A band made up of startup founders, and the obligatory visit by the police to end the party are proof of a real Berlin experience.

Demo Day

On Wednesday, we invited more than 80 of Berlin and Europe’s best angel and VC investors to join us for our first Demo Day in Berlin. We were hosted by our friends at BDMI who spared no effort to make our day a blast.

8 Seedcamp companies presented their companies, demoed their products and met with investors on a beautiful day in Berlin. The 4 new teams also joined in and got a chunk of the action on their first day in the Family. In alphabetical order, these were the participating teams:

• Countly - Open source, real-time analytics for mobile apps.
• CrowdProcess - Web-based Supercomputing.
• FishBrain - We help anglers worldwide catch more and bigger fish and brag about it.
• Knowable - The social network for makers.
• minubo – Helps online shops to take better, data-driven decisions.
• Planvine - Providers of comprehensive, accurate and hyper-local event data
• Poq Studio - We make it easy for fashion brands to get their own branded mobile apps and websites.
• Rawstream - Secure web access, boost SMB employee productivity. We guarantee a positive ROI in 2 weeks
• SimpleTax - Now anyone can easily achieve tax zen & save money.
• Smartward - Reducing human error in hospitals. A ward management and communication app.
• TruckTrack - Easy, powerful trucking business management.

Carlos shared some of the content that emerged from the program over time and dove deep on the product market fit cycle which helps companies form a compelling offering and product. Philipp gave an insight view of what happened on this springs’ US trip, shared his views on the local differences of different startup hubs, and the current state of mind in the US venture capital scene.

As it befits an investment company with a media background, BDMI hosted us for a great after-Demo-Day party on the roof of their beautiful office – including an up and coming band from the BMG repertoire. Listening to tunes by Lino Modica, we had a great finish with a view:

We want to thank all of the startups who participated, the mentors who put in their valuable time and advice, and our partners at The WYE, BDMI, Factory, and our friends at Osborne Clarke for supporting us in Berlin. This event was a highlight of the Seedcamp year, and we look forward to coming back in fall.

Likewise, our annual sponsors at PayPal, Nokia, Barclays, Google, Microsoft Bizspark and Qualcomm were more than supportive for Berlin, and have made our foray to Germany possible.

Seedcamp Week London in September

Our next Seedcamp Week takes place in London from the 2nd till 5th of September 2013, applications are open now and you can apply directly via our website.

We also have upcoming Mini Seedcamps planned in Barcelona (12th of June), Rijeka (17th of July) and Tallinn (24th of July) and will be announcing more soon. We hope to meet some great teams in these locations to invite to Seedcamp Week London.

Big data is big business at the moment. And while Futurelytics concentrates on small-to-medium-sized businesses and emphasises the importance of relevance when it comes to customer analytics, rather than simply the size of data sets, potential customers will perceive its offering as a big data solution. The firm recently won funding at Seedcamp Budapest and CEO Daniel Hastik is now aiming to make an impact by selling to sales and marketing teams in the US.

¤ What differentiates Futurelytics from similar services?

It is a data mining solution. We connect marketing and sales guys, giving them information about customers by tracking data from multiple sources and scoring the customers from the best to the worst based on various parameters. We then group these customers’ information into segments so the guys in marketing and sales can use targeted campaigns. We also pull the data from our platform to marketing automation systems like MailChimp and Marketo.

We take the best practises and visualise the data and work with companies automatically so that the end user doesn’t have to make any major decisions. We tell them what will work and that’s the major difference. For example, we could say ‘in order to get churn customers back to you, you should do this’. Our team has a background in business analytics, so we are looking for meaningful patterns in the data. It doesn’t matter if it is just two rows in Excel, if someone doesn’t understand it then it’s the same if he has five terabytes of data that he doesn’t understand. We give the user what we think is important and what is not. Other companies focus on the size of the data and not the relevancy.

¤ What is your business model?

We make money in three different ways. One is a monthly subscription model for the platform itself, which is USD450 per month. The second revenue stream is our independent app on a CRM marketplace, for example Salesforce’s App Exchange. The third is license fees for what we call ‘powered by Futurelytics’. We are negotiating with certain CRM providers to embed our functionality.

¤ Who are your main competitors?

One would be Custora and the other one would be Cloud9. There are obviously the big players like SPSS from IBM, but that’s not the segment for our customer reach, we don’t go up into the enterprise we stay with small-to-medium sized businesses.

 ¤ What’s the biggest challenge you currently face?

We are a US-based company, but all the guys are in the Czech Republic at the moment, with one sales guy in the UK. For most businesses to set up in the US  you need to be a US citizen so it’s quite difficult for European startups without having a US citizen in the team to actually start a business in the US.

The other challenge is getting the word out, so the marketing and sales, which we have not tracked as well as we do the technical side. We are now looking for people who can help us with that and that’s one of the reasons we joined Seedcamp. Their network, their knowledge and their companies within their investment team solved the same problems we are facing. So we are sharing a lot of information and that has been really helpful.

¤ What do you think is the hottest trend in digital media?

Competition between the stable, TechCrunch-like blog styles against blogs for particular technologies, which shift from the more mainstream to specific technologies. I am finding more information from our competitor’s blog than on GigaOm, for example.

VERDICT

The demand for big data services is booming. The market will be worth USD18.2bn this year before climbing to USD47.8bn in 2017 and analytics applications revenue is forecast to be the fastest-growing segment in the next four years, with revenues expected to increase by nearly 300%. Services such as Futurelytics, which promise to decipher the reams of online information and present actionable strategies from it, offer obvious tangible benefits for companies and salespeople. IBM expects its overall business intelligence revenue alone to come in at USD25bn by 2015, with plenty of dollars available to those that can gain scale quickly.

The main challenge for Futurelytics is standing out in an already overcrowded space. As well as startups such as Custora and Cloud9, big guns like Accenture and IBM are trying their hand at customer analytics. While Hastik maintains that the likes of IBM are after the big enterprise customers, where it is after small businesses, it doesn’t seem a stretch for IBM to scale out to SMEs. Futurelytics needs to make sure it can build out its offering quickly and expand rapidly to new markets.

The other issue is its current focus on the US. Hastik already concedes that it is struggling to expand, with problems setting up its services in the US hampering progress. Plenty of homegrown competition will continue to emerge stateside, while Futurelytics deals with these challenges.  The firm also doesn’t disclose financial information, making it hard to ascertain how things are going in markets where it is available. It is important to note that it’s still early days, with the firm only launching in September. And it does already have 25 clients on board, including brands such as Yamaha, Time Warner Cable and Livestrong. As a result, the firm is “just starting” to generate revenue and the next six months will prove crucial for the startup.

AT A GLANCE
CEO: Daniel Hastik
HQ: Delaware, US
Founded: September 2012
Employees: Six
Commercial launch: September 2012
Funding to date: EUR50,000 (USD67,000)
Investors: Seedcamp

COMPETITORS
Custora

”If the whole world was a state, Istanbul would be the capital of it.” - Napoleon

Throughout its 3000 year history, Istanbul has hosted kings, sultans, queens, presidents, popes, an UEFA Cup Final, a historic Champions League Final, World Basketball Championships, Formula One Racing, Guns N’ Roses, Madonna, Michael Jackson and James Bond…Yet this global city has not, to this day, hosted a single Seedcamp event.

This is about to change.

On April 30th, the inaugural Mini Seedcamp Istanbul event will be held at the ITU University Maslak Campus KSB Auditorium.

Turkey has a fledgling startup community with over 200 companies registered on AngelList. Its ecosystem of entrepreneurs, VC’s, incubators, mentors and angels is growing quickly. There are plenty of national and international success stories such as Yemek Sepeti, Gitti Gidiyor, Markafoni and Peak Games to encourage and signal to everyone in the community that a very bright future can be real and achievable.

Seed capital with international mentorship and networking opportunities is the missing key element for our young local startups with global ambitions to succeed. This is why the Mini Seedcamp Istanbul event is very important for our ecosystem and why we’re very excited to be a part of this inaugural event.

So without further ado, below are the list of amazing startups that are selected to participate in the first Mini Seedcamp Istanbul:

• Bacikalfa  - Helping families and care providers to meet.
• Cardino - Send real postcards with AR videos anywhere, anytime.
• CoContest - Crowdsourcing for Interior Design.
• Countly - Open source, real-time analytics for mobile apps.
• Gowime - Travel Social Network.
• Konak.la (SocialCloud) – Social media content based travel platform.
• Picus Security - A completely new type of product for assessing and monitoring IT security controls.
• Referbase - Skill-based social network.
• Turgezgini - Customizable booking for tours and tourist activities.
• ZulaMobile - Mobile App Creator.

Beware, they might just disrupt the market you are in.

Yalim K. Gerger
Founder
Formspider

Seedcamp Week Berlin is next on the schedule, and in less than a month some of Europe’s best Entrepreneurs, Operators, and Investors will join us for a week of events in Germany’s Capital. We have some great mentors and investors signed up – as you could see on Twitter today, they’re looking forward to meeting some great startups from across Europe.

What is happening at Seedcamp Week Berlin?

Mentoring day, taking place at The Factory, will include Entrepreneurs, Product and Marketing experts, and some of the best operators across the German and European startup scene. Some of the people included are Christian Hernandez, David Noel, Jason Goodman, Paul Jozefak and Christian Thaler-Wolski - these are mentors the Seedcamp teams have consistently rated extremely high, and thus we are happy to have them on board again.

Seedcamp Week will also include a Demo Day taking place at BDMI, where we will showcase the best teams we saw at Seedcamp Berlin, and some of our earlier Seedcamp teams who are currently fundraising. For investors, this is a great way to catch up on the progress of teams they already know, and to meet new teams from Seedcamp Week Berlin. The top investments funds will be represented and we already have great names signed up to attend including investors from Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital, Balderton Capital, BDMI, Earlybird, DFJ Esprit and T-Venture (Investors: let us know if you are interested to take part).

The selected startups will already meet the Seedcamp Team on Sunday to get prepared and ready for the week at The Wye. Monday will see investment interviews, during which the participating teams will pitch to the Seedcamp Team and investors for inclusion in the year long Seedcamp Program.

How to take part?

In the past and coming weeks, Mini Seedcamps are happening all across Europe – from Belgrade to Tel Aviv, from Istanbul to Amsterdam, and in Kiev and Stockholm. Out of these local events, we will invite teams to participate in Seedcamp Week Berlin. Mini Seedcamps are a new and exciting way for us to travel to local entrepreneurship and startup hubs and meet lots of companies close to home. We bring along some of our teams who share their Seedcamp experience, and engage with the local mentor and investment community to increase visibility and access for the teams taking part.

Startups can also apply directly to Berlin and get selected through the traditional application process – if you already know about Seedcamp and know what to expect, this is a straightforward way to engage. You can apply now and work on your application until the deadline on Sunday 21st, midnight.

We are very thankful for the Seedcamp Sponsors; Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Qualcomm Ventures and PayPal Developer and our Event Partner in Berlin, BDMI, who make this event possible. Without them, Seedcamp couldn’t travel the globe and do all that we do for entrepreneurs. We would also like to thank our venue hosts in Berlin; The Wye, The Factory and BDMI.

Campus is celebrating its one year anniversary and the celebrations will be ongoing throughout the whole of April. As part of the celebrations all Campus Partners will be organizing events to showcase their work for those in and around London who still don’t know what happens at 4-5 Bonhill Street or who are curious to learn more.

We’re very proud to call Campus home and are eager to show the wider startup community who we are and what we’re up to. On the 18th of April, Seedcamp is taking part in the many activities included in the celebrations and we’re bringing a taste of our bread and butter to residents and the wider startup community, with SeedPeek.

First up, Carlos Espinal, Seedcamp Partner, will have an informal chat with the founders of two Seedcamp teams that climbed their way to Seedcamp HQ on Campus’ fourth floor. Subscrib and Planvine, both startups were “Made in Campus” and grow from the ecosystem that is being built here. Subscrib’s founders met at Central Working in the basement back in September and Planvine moved to Techhub the day that Campus opened. Both these teams joined the Seedcamp family after winning Seedcamp Week London back in January and they’ll be sharing their stories and experiences.

After that we’ll be hearing from another success story, this time an outcome from our other endeavours at Campus: Seedhack. The winners of the last edition of our very own hackathon, Relist, will be here to talk about how they went from a weekend of full-on coding and brainstorming at Seedhack, to an actual startup. They still work downstairs at Central Working everyday. Since they got a wildcard at Seedhack for our next Seedcamp Week in Berlin they now eager to show us their progress and how they’ve evolved.

Finally we’ll be joined by the founders of a company that went through the Seedcamp program back in Seedcamp’s first years. They’ll be able to share their success story and how Seedcamp was a key stepping stone in their journey to success.

If you want to join us during the morning of the 18th of April please sign up here.