SportUp celebrated their first accelerator graduates together with +100 attendees at their first SportUp Meet

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!)

We had a fantastic kick-off of SportUp with amazing startups, great coaches, and last Tuesday a lovely event where we gathered a vibrant crowd of sports entrepreneurship & sportstech enthousiasts. The Belgian Sports Entrepreneurship community is definitely growing.But, no more words now. This is the aftermovie of the first SportUp Meet!??Tag a friend in the comments who needs to join our community!(PS: if you're a sport startup ready to go hard, applications for SportUp Start, our acceleration program together with Imec.istart, are open. All info here: https://www.sportup.be/sportup-start )

Posted by Sportupbe on Thursday, May 9, 2019

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:

View this post on Instagram

If you have a passion for it… you’ll ALWAYS find a way. Right?? . What’s an important lesson you learned during your first year of working on your business? Tell us in the comments. . Ps: you can apply now to be part of the 2nd season of our acceleration program! Visit the link in bio. . #startup #advice #accelerator #sportstech #startups #betech #lessonslearned

A post shared by Sportupbe (@sportup.be) on Jun 12, 2019 at 3:16am PDT

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.)