Unifund and University of Jyväskylä (JYU) held the fifth venture capital event on Wed the 1st of November 2023 together with support from Business Jyväskylä and The Startup Factory. The Startup Factory hosted the event for a second time at their facilities at rapidly developing Kangas area in Jyväskylä. In total 15 different investors had registered to hear the pitches from the five JYU born startups.
In addition, JYU hosted seven visitors from collaborating universities in UNITeD consortium who had arrived to deepen the ties between the participating universities. UNITeD is part of the EIT HEI initiative of the European Union and aims to empower consortium universities’ interdisciplinary approaches to reconfigure the universities’ entrepreneurial and innovation capacity.
In addition to VCs Sparkmind, Butterfly Ventures, Innovestor, Voima Ventures, Trind Ventures, Nordic Food Tech Ventures, Vendep Capital, Courage Ventures/Open Circle, Superhero Capital, Failup Ventures, Liquido.vc, Greencode Ventures, Midinvest, Fov Ventures, and Unifund, there were also participants from EBAN and more innovation or support oriented KasvuOpen Propellerhat, Nordea, and the hosting Startup Factory.
Extended pitches gave the potential investors an excellent opportunity to dive deeper into the Startups. This resulted, again, in detailed discussions and many one-to-one meetings between the new companies and interested investors. It is clear that these kinds of events are needed also in the future.
The Unifund VC day has become a tradition in the good sense of the word. Some of the participants have attended the meeting already several times and the event has transformed also into a meeting place of trust and development. Even if some of the participating pitchers may have been too early to receive funding this year, they got valuable insight on what to do and where to go to reach the next level.
The pitching Startups of University of Jyväskylä background were Precision Phage, Natural Antivirals, BiopSense, Wellpro Impact Solutions and Psyon Games.
“It was very fruitful and interesting to see Finnish Startup scene in action. Hopefully we will bring our investors or startups here next year. This is exactly what the UNITeD consortium aims to achieve” – Dr. Kristina Babelytė-Labanauskė, Head of Innovation Office, Research and Innovation Department, University of Vilnius, Lithuania.
Similar to 2022, this primarily face-to-face meeting was arranged adjacent to the KasvuOpen Carneval and the regional Yrityspäivä (Entrepreneurship Day) provided the participants traveling from a distance on excellent opportunity to attend all three events.
