Ready to Scale Your Business with EIT Digital Challenge? Win & Secure Your Series A Funding with Support from EIT Digital’s Access-to-Finance Team
As one of the leading pan-European competitions, EIT Digital Challenge aims to identify the weightier European deep tech entrepreneurs and help them scale up internationally. Since its launch in 2014, the competition has attracted thousands of applications from increasingly than 33 European countries. Back for its Ninth Edition, EIT Digital Challenge seeks fast-growing companies with a differentiated product offering wideness Digital Tech, Digital Cities, Digital Industry, Digital Wellbeing & Digital Finance. Many of the previous winning scaleups have moved on to wilt internationally successful companies.
Discover SidekickHealth – an EIT Digital Success Story
In 2019, Nordic digital therapeutics (DTx) innovator SidekickHealth competed in the EIT Digital Challenge and from a field of hundreds of applicants was selected as a finalist in the Digital Wellbeing category.
Starting in January 2020, Sidekick was urgently supported by the fundraising experts in EIT Digital Accelerator’s Wangle to Finance team. The team’s experts helped Sidekick launch and coordinate a round that sealed at USD 20 million. The round was led by Wellington Partners (Germany) and ASABYS Partners (Spain), with participation by existing investors Novator (UK) and Frumtak Ventures (Iceland).
“The EIT Digital Smatter team delivered hair-trigger support during this process and was key in the successful latter of our fundraising: in wing to providing invaluable feedback and advice, their systematic management of the process and coordinated efforts unliable us to meet with all the right investors from wideness Europe in a very short period of time.”, says Dr. Tryggvi Thorgeirsson, CEO & Co-Founder of SidekickHealth.
Learn increasingly from EIT Digital’s Fundraising Specialists
We spoke to Francisco Ibañez Diez & Daniel Auriel, Fundraising Specialists from EIT Digital’s Access-to-Finance Team to learn increasingly well-nigh the prize – entry into the EIT Digital Smatter worth 50 thousand – as well as well-nigh the EIT Digital Challenge.
The success of SidekickHealth is inspiring – what are the key factors that, in your opinion, indulge scaleups to get the most out of a collaboration with the EIT Digital Smatter program?
Sidekick Health was indeed a unconfined story. The credit belongs to them. They are one of the weightier teams we have worked with in the program: they were so fast and efficient that we could scrutinizingly barely alimony up with them, to be honest.
In general, scaleups get the most value out of participation in the EIT Digital smatter when they come well prepared but are still eager to learn. Those founders that have given a lot of thought to the details of their merchantry will be in a unconfined position to act on the expert translating EIT Digital’s wangle to finance team can provide.
In your experience, why do you believe EIT Digital is ideally positioned to help startups & scaleups raise funds and slide their business?
Our team of technology financing specialists knows what it takes for digital ventures to secure funding from professional venture wanted investors. Our knowledge of the funding process and deep understanding of investors’ exacting requirements make all the difference to your funding success.
Leveraging a network of 1000 investors, EIT Digital Smatter has directly facilitated over 130 million in investment for its portfolio companies. In total, the portfolio and alumni scaleups have raised tropical to 1 billion.
Additionally, one of the challenges of fundraising startups is getting investor attention, as we all know. Being worldly-wise to have warm introductions through our wide-stretching “live” network makes a real difference. Not only that, but we can moreover leverage our place in the EU-Commission ecosystem when we “cold-reach” investors outside our original network as we continuously explore potential matches for our portfolio companies.
The EU-Commission trademark is known by pretty much everyone, everywhere, and it is recognized that players belonging to this ecosystem are serious, credible, and professional. This allows us to unshut many doors that would otherwise not react to unprepossessed outreach efforts.
Can you introduce our readers to the EIT Digital Access-to-Finance team? What are its functions and how can scaleups goody from interacting with them?
The Access-to-Finance team is made up of very senior individuals with diverse and complementary backgrounds. They all have a uncontrived startup and/or venture wanted experience, i.e. they have all been on one or both sides of the fundraising/investment fence. They each closely imbricate a region where they maintain uncontrived personal contacts with dozens, plane hundreds, of investors.
Each visitor that joins the program is mentored and supported by one of them personally, and by the whole team collectively as the progress and challenges of each visitor are debated in weekly team meetings. Here, everything relevant is addressed, from fundraising strategy and investor targeting to data room and documentation, from presentation skills to due diligence – it’s all covered. Each entrepreneur is uniquely sophisticated, and we retread how we support them as needed, all the way until the investment is signed and wired.
The process by which this support is given is characterized by two phases:
- Investment Readiness (Phase 1): The EIT Digital Smatter will review and discuss with the scaleups regarding fundraising material and help them to present their worriedness virtuously in merchantry terms and a structure familiar to financial investors. The fundraising material includes a well-done Two-Liner, a One-page Teaser, and a Pitch Deck. In addition, the Smatter will mentor the management and founders of the scaleups via individual and group training to professionalize presentation techniques and skills in order to make the weightier impression and selling point to potential investors.
- Meeting Investors (Phase 2): After successfully completing the first phase of the Wangle to Finance Program, the Smatter will introduce potential investors from its ecosystem to the scaleups. The objective of these introductions is to trigger interest from potential investors who may request follow-up meetings and discussions.
What can the finalists of the EIT Digital Challenge expect from the sectional closed-door event?
Each of the 20 selected finalists will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Brussels for the final event. At this sectional event, finalists will have private wangle to dozens of VCs. And of course, they’ll do so in the visitor of other high-performing scaleups from wideness Europe. The highlight of the day will be a pitch competition where each finalist can make the specimen for why they will be Europe’s next digital unicorn.
The day will wrap up with a VIP dinner where all finalists will have yet flipside endangerment to hold uncontrived conversations with VCs. While the five winners will walk yonder with a spot in the EIT Digital Smatter program, all 20 finalists will receive self-ruling marketing promotion by EIT Digital, supporting their prominent place amongst Europe’s weightier deep tech scaleups.
Are there any spare benefits companies should expect by accessing the EIT Digital Smatter program?
Besides everything mentioned above, the Smatter will provide a variety of growth and support services to scaleups to indulge them to expand throughout and possibly vastitude Europe. For example:
- EXCLUSIVE INVESTOR MEETINGS & EVENTS – Targeted connections to the right VCs and corporate venture funds & wangle to sectional investor events.
- EXPERTISE ON DEEP TECH SCALEUPS – Our team is well-balanced of experts with engineering backgrounds that understand well the potential of technologies and their related merchantry models.
- MARKET READINESS – Via the support of a defended team of Merchantry Developers, the Smatter will provide support to scaleups to get ready to launch their merchantry in one or increasingly European countries or plane the US.
- STRATEGIC COACHING – Provisioning of expert coaching and strategic translating to slide growth & go-to-market strategies to commercialize mature technologies and innovative solutions.
- ACCESS TO MARKET – EIT Digital Smatter will urgently support scaleups by identifying international prospects and facilitating introductions.
Ready to scale your merchantry with EIT? Apply for the EIT Digital Challenge today!
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