Wow. One month ago, on May 7, SportUp had its first SportUp Meet event.
And what a fantastic evening it was!
With well over 120 attendees, the room -at MeetDistrict, located in the Ghelamco Arena in Ghent- was packed. They celebrated their first 3 startup accelerator graduates (all from the Boost program), introduced exciting new sport startups, held a pitch competition and showcased Belgian based sportstech entrepreneur Koen Vercauteren and his business Ledsreact.
All of this after SportUp was launched only 7 months earlier, backed by imec, Sport Vlaanderen, and ourselves at Ghent University.
A short recap!
(Ps: if you don’t want to miss any next Meet event, click here and join their member group. There’s already 812 members in it!)
Only happy faces to start:
The Boost program delivered 3 graduates: Smart Mind, WhizzGolf and Winnovators.
All 3 of them were up for the challenge to win the pitch competition, and every attendee had a chance to vote.
And the winner was… Smart Mind!
Next up was Koen Vercauteren, owner of Ledsreact, who developed a smart training device. He shared his business story and announced great news: he got selected for the SportUp Start program which offers 50K pre-seed funding and a year long customized support to further expand his business.
At the end, Cronos and Sport Vlaanderen showcased their new project called ‘Panega Sports‘; a platform that centralizes, analyzes and visualizes (elite) sports data.
Some of the Boost graduates also received a strong wake-up call during the program. They learned some valuable lessons, which they shared with us during the Meet event:
And so… how about you?
Do you have a sports tech startup idea but don’t quite know how to turn it into reality?
Or are you a mid-stage startup looking to scale up your business and even go international?
Don’t hesitate and apply NOW for one of the 2 SportUp accelerator programs, Boost or Start!
SportUp Boost season 2 starts September 2019. (The call for applications is open now, and ends August 31.)
SportUp Start runs 3 times a year; a new application process starts every January, May and September. (Next open call is September 2019.)