CEMS Students Placed 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the Startup VSE Competition
On Tuesday, December 14, 2021, the finals of Startup VSE competition organized by the Department of Entrepreneurship and the VSE xPORT Business Accelerator took place. Student teams competed for a scholarship of CZK 40,000 to support innovative business. Seven teams from the whole University were selected for the finals from the entries.
The five-member jury included representatives of academia and the investing community. The investors on the jury were Vladimíra Josefiová from the Reflex Capital venture fund, who also acts as the CFO of the Spaceti startup, Zuzana Ondrejová from J&T Ventures and Matěj Zabadal from V-Sharp Ventures. The academic sphere was represented by the head of the Department of Entrepreneurship and the Vice-Dean for Science and Research of the Faculty of Business Administration, Prof. Martin Lukeš. The VSE xPORT accelerator was represented by Jakub Stránský, an experienced mentor and founder of the Techambition startup.
The teams had to give an online presentation in the “startup pitch” format and lead a subsequent discussion with the jury, which was interested in the size of the problem solved by the startup, the team’s ability to bring the product to market and the potential for dynamic growth.
The SunAware team took the first place in the competition, followed by the TalentSeed team in second place and City Adventure in third. All three teams were composed of CEMS VSE students.
SunAware
SunAware addresses the negative effects of UV radiation on children’s skin. Their first product is a cap that alerts parents in the event of excessive skin exposure. The basis of the solution is a smart fabric, which changes its colour according to the amount of UV radiation and thus warns parents. The SunAware team wants to gradually expand its product offering with additional smart fabrics.
Nowadays, many parents are concerned about the negative impacts of UV exposure on their children. But how much UV exposure is too much and how can we measure it?
We wanted to find a solution for this problem and came up with the first UV detecting hat for children. Using a smart textile solution, our hat indicates the level of UV exposure via a color-changing strip. This way, parents are notified and can take appropriate action to protect their child from UV damage.
As a team, we aspire to become a smart textile company that provides customer-centric solutions through innovative smart textiles. This will go beyond clothing for children and UV detection and will cover a broad range of customer needs and use cases.
Our team consists of goal-oriented and passionate CEMS students from VSE. A mission of ours is to educate and help parents along their way to keep their children safe, while spending some lighthearted time with their loved ones.
TalentSeed
The TalentSeed team placed second in the competition. It is working on a digital solution for finding young football talents.
TalentSeed is a middle man between football clubs, coaches, and young undiscovered football talents. Think of it as a “LinkedIn for Athletes”. With TalentSeed we want to give chance to all the young aspiring football players to become professionals, no matter where they are located or from which background they come from. We will achieve this by crowdsourcing a database of young professionals players around the world that we will make available to the coaches. This way we will create a worldwide interconnected network, where these talents can offer their football skills on one side and bring valuable assets without effort to football clubs and coaches on the other side.
City Adventure
Third place went to City Adventure, which develops games for travelers. Their goal is to convey local knowledge of the city and show players interesting places in a fun way.
The organizing team of the Startup VSE competition is already working on the preparation of the competition for the summer semester 2022. For current information, follow the facebook of the Department of Entrepreneurship.
