Startup presentations at #CPHFTW Town Hall #6

Tonight we have six awesome startups for you to present. And they're not only from Copenhagen. The first one that we're going to have on stage tonight is coming from Malmö, all the way from there. And it's going to tell you about how to solve the problem of fraud, hackers, and other scam people on your website. Please give a huge applause to Johann from Castle.io. So, hi. I'm Johann. I'm from Malmö, as you heard. We're going to see some really cool startups here with nice apps, a boom blaster, and a flying skateboard, I think. But we're going to start with...let's see. So, will I run through my...okay. So, with the first one, we have... The first product is an enterprise business-to-business security tool. Sounds exciting, right? But...so the thing that we're about is we detect fraudsters, hackers, bots on websites. So, let's say you have a website and you have someone who always logs in from Denmark. And then all of a sudden, someone logs in from Sweden. That's pretty weird. So, we assign the alarm and we tell the website owner, you, about this. And you can investigate. But...so I'm not going to talk more about our company. I'm just going to tell you about what I was doing 18 months ago. I was standing on a similar stage but in San Francisco. So, we got this opportunity to talk at this San Francisco festival called Launch Festival, which is really cool, one of the biggest. And we stood there on stage and we were pretty hyped about this. We saw everyone was tweeting about us. Jason Calacanis is big. Angel Investor was tweeting about us. And all the visas came to us. And they said like, oh, guys, maybe you need some money. Maybe you should talk to us. So, we went like around in the valley for four or five weeks and talking to all these investors. And I got this email from a friend of mine, an angel investor in Malmo, which he's called Hampus Jacobson. And he sent me this. First, he sent me...he asked me, how's the run going? Are you meeting investors? Maybe you should raise a small angel round to make this project real and hire people maybe. And I was like, pretty cocky because I was up there on stage. Everyone loved us, I thought. So, we said, no, we have some angels in the last three weeks. We'll see what happens. But we're pretty close to a seed run. So, we're skipping the angel round actually. And then we went back to Sweden and no one called us. So, we continued on our product. We pivoted once, twice. Then eventually, like eight months later, we raised the angel round, which was great because now we really found what we want to build. But now we're going to San Francisco again to raise our seed round. So, Hampus will probably email me in a few weeks and he will ask me, how's the seed run going? And I will tell him, well... I think we'll skip the seed round. We'll go straight to the series A. So, see you here in 18 months. Thank you so much, Johan. The next startup... How many of you guys are expats in this room? Right? We're quite a few. And the next app is really exciting. It's a social icebreaker app. So, please welcome Tim Ellison from Plain on stage. Hello. Hello. This is the... I have a 15-year-old nephew in England who thinks it's really cool that his uncle lives in Copenhagen. But he doesn't actually believe that he's been invited to speak in front of 700 people. So, I need your help for ten, you know, five seconds or something. Just on the count of three, I'd like everyone just to say, hi, Jonathan. Are we ready? One. Two. Three. Hi, Jonathan. There you have it, buddy. So, let's get down to business, right? So, here we go. My name is Tim. I come from Newcastle. My husband's dog, Elske's, is a dog. Now, you've never heard that in a pitch, I'm sure. Now, for most... You know, for some people out there, that wouldn't have made much sense. And for other people out there, it probably didn't make much sense. What I just said was, my name is Tim. I come from Newcastle upon Tyne. And my girlfriend's mother's dog loves eating balls and curry. But... Please work. But we did not make plain for my girlfriend's mother's dog. That would be too niche. We built plain because it's difficult for a new person in a new place sometimes to connect with the people around them in their community. The ability to sometimes meet new people, just arrange things to do, or just simply find out what's going on in and around your neighborhood. This is the reason why we built this product. So, this is introducing you to the three main features of the app right now. We have our signals, we have responses, and we have social cards. Put simply, the signals are local messages that users of plain push out into their neighborhood. We're really interested in the neighborhood that you're in. So, we want to show you if something's happening in Vestibor, we want to show you signals that are from Vestibor before we show you signals from Amar. Signals are the spine of the application. Right now, we've got over a thousand signals that have been shared on the private beta. Responses is where people respond to you, and you can, at that point, decide to break the ice. The third part of the exchange is then the social cards. You might recognize some of the handsome gentlemen there that are already using the app. We've been swapping social cards. The social card acts almost like a business card, but better, in that it has the details that people are actually interested in. So, you can customize it with a biography, you can customize it with social handles and a picture. So, that's what we're doing at the minute. Pleased to announce that we're coming out of private beta tonight into public beta. So, we're testing the app with expats in Scandinavia and friends, some of which are the people in the community. We'd love to get you on board. Thanks very much for your time, and I look forward to speaking to you later tonight. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tim. The next startup founder has on his LinkedIn profile his goal world domination. And he's starting with a gaming subscription vertical. Please welcome on stage, Les Jensen from OnePlay. Thanks. So, yeah. Hi, everybody. How you doing? So, my name is Les. I'm the CEO of a company called OnePlay. We basically looked at the gaming market and realized there is no Netflix for gaming. So, we decided to build one. Originally, we started out actually with discs in the mail. It worked quite nice. Until we kind of realized there is not much future in that. So, we built a digital subscription service where people can basically download unlimited games for PC and Android devices. So, that was our first pivot. We also started out by selling directly business to consumer until we realized that that's actually going to cost us a shitload of money. And we needed to raise a lot more money than we actually could at that time. So, what we decided, and this is kind of our second pivot, as it's family called, is that we decided to sell basically to B2B distribution. So, in the stores this Christmas, you will actually start seeing a little box that says OnePlay on it. And you can actually buy a one-year subscription. So, we sell more or less to the retail chains. So, from going from physical to digital, we're actually going back to physical again. And we're doing bundling deals with other partners. Worldwide, as one of them is Lenovo. So, basically, if you buy a new laptop here for Christmas, you will, on most of the models, actually get a OnePlay subscription as well. And the second leg of our business is actually public libraries. So, we actually sell it to public libraries. And if you feel like it, you can go down with your library card. And you actually can get free access to our entire library of games. Um... Oh. That works. And that actually also brings us to one of the user experience challenges that we have. And this is our very nice app with a few of the games that we have. We originally actually sold to gamers, which are very tech savvy. And then we started selling to libraries, which was basically the little old ladies. So, there's a very steep learning curve for us there. So, that's basically it. And, yeah, it's a free trial. Just hit me up afterwards. Thank you. Thank you very much. Coming up next, we have an amazing startup that is kind of working on changing the way of personal transportation. Please welcome Sune from Faraday Emotion. Hello. So, let me start by telling you a secret. We are actually not just in a hall. We are in a time machine. I did meet up with Doc Brown earlier this week. And we turned this whole place into a big time machine. So, we will be able to travel. 30 years ahead and a little bit previous to now. So, but before we go into that, when I was talking to Doc, I actually asked him, so, what do you think about arriving in 2015 and not having flying hoverboards? At least not, you know, things that can be used for transportation in urban settings. And he was saying to me, you know, I'm very disappointed. And so did I. Anyways, guys, let's imagine that we are pressing the button now and going 30 years ahead. Which kind of vehicles do you see your kids use? Which kind of vehicles will you see yourself use? And which kind of vehicles do you see that your parents will use? I guess that all of you are coming up with different imaginations of how they will look, how they will behave. What is the technology? Is it very high tech? You know, is it low tech? Is it talking together with each other? Is it intelligent? All of this. We want to try to empower people to innovate with our building blocks, different kind of vehicles that you are probably imagining right now. Why not? One and a half year ago, we started out with some building blocks. And don't be afraid. This is not a bomb. This is a battery pack. This battery pack takes a guy like me 10 kilometers. This is the current state of technology. I will see if I can get to my other pocket. One second. Not a bomb again. Maybe it is. Again, not a bomb. This is part of our technology that we are using today. But when I started one and a half year ago, it was simpler components but basically the same. This was enabling me to make a simple prototype with the help of 3D printing, simple electronics, and a little bit of programming. All open source and free software. And with a little bit of hacking, I was actually able to make this very, very simple electric vehicle. And yes, it is an electric skateboard. This is what we have today. Back then, it was only me. Now we are a team. On the left side, we have what we call the spine. This is the spine. This is basically our own open source custom version of what you saw before. To the right, it is the most advanced electric skateboard in the world. This is all built by using our components and our technology. You can go from the left side to the right side and upgrade as you want. The components can be used for making different kind of vehicles. Like you just see, the technology is very compact. You can do different kind of things, program it, hack it. Everything is open source. You can download all the files. And today, we announced all the 3D files for the spine is available for download as of right now. We have two months of preorders now. And we just hit 50 preorders when we came home from the Maker Faire in Rome. We are not selling the extreme version officially. But we have had two calls from the biggest 3D printing companies in the consumer and in the professional segments. And they asked kindly if we would like to sell it to them. And we said, of course, not no. That's it. I'm Sune Pedersen. Faraday Motion. We are right outside. We are going to do a demonstration later. Amazing product, right? We all got to try the electric skateboard. The next company that I'm happy to introduce was just in use recently because they raised 25 million Danish kroner just a couple of weeks ago to scale their deal aggregating website. Please welcome on stage Stefan from Bounty. Hey, everybody. Is this on? Yeah. Great to see such a brilliant turnout. Yeah. My name is Stefan. I'll spend the next couple of minutes just explaining what Bounty is all about. If you want to connect, I'm on all the classic social media. I would love to. If you're into libertarian ramblings and let's say some tech and startup news in between that. The last four years we've been building on a product that we call Bounty, which is basically something where we promise the consumer to find something that they can use. We promise the consumer to find the best value for money experience no matter where they are. So we aggregate all these deals and content pieces where there's a discount element for many different partner sites, 120 partners as we speak. We're doing that in eight different countries in 1,200 cities when we brag. Yeah. And we are a team of 34 people and we're currently hiring for tech and marketing positions. So if you want somebody who's talented and want to work with us with that, just send us our way. We're growing quite fast. And as I was just introduced us, we just raised a big Series A round of 25 million Danish kroner. And that's on behalf of our quite fast growth rate, tripling year over year. And we're probably not done yet. So that was it for me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Five are really awesome startups already. The last startup that I'm going to present you tonight is also really, really cool because those guys are really young. They started out of high school and are still only 20. And I'm very happy to introduce Jesper from Soundbox, and they make really good party equipment. Welcome, Jesper, on stage. Hello. My name is Jesper, and I'm a co-founder of Soundbox. At Soundbox, we produce portable speakers segmented at festival attendees. I'm going to tell you a bit about how Soundbox started, where we are now, and where we're hoping to go. So basically, Soundbox started back in the summer of 2014 when me and one of my co-founders, Christopher, was about to graduate high school. We needed some money to pay for a Roskilde Festival trip and generally just the parties and the student weeks to come. And we were broke as shit. But, however, we had been building speakers for our own festival camps in the last couple of years and had developed some experience. So we thought, maybe we can build some of these speakers and sell them online. So we set up an ad on DeBloisVis, the Danish version of Craigslist, and we were thinking, maybe we can sell two, maybe three speakers if we're lucky. But in the next four weeks, we were contacted by more than 175 people, all wanting to buy a speaker. And we could build five. So we realized there was a demand for this. However, at this time, we were graduating, we got drunk all the time, and we didn't really have the time to build a startup. But New Year's Eve, 2014 to 2015, we had an idea. Why is all festival speakers powered by car batteries, heavy car batteries that are this big and terrible for the environment? Why can't you power them off of the batteries in your phone, basically, just bigger? And this was really the idea that fueled Soundbox. So in January, we started building prototypes in my basement. We did this in February. And then on the 13th of March, we launched Soundbox.com, and we had an article in Metro Express saying, 19-year-old guys with success. Developed their own festival speaker. It's battery-driven. I'd say success is a bit of an exaggeration since we were yet to sell our first speaker at this point. However, in the next couple of months, we experienced what I would like to call hockey stick growth. Demand kept on rising. Kept on rising towards Rosskilde Festival. And two weeks before Rosskilde Festival, we had to hire 16 full-time employees in one day to try to keep up with the demand. And yet, we still couldn't keep up with the demand. So we had to say we were sold out, basically. When arriving at Rosskilde Festival to open our booth, we were thinking, hmm, maybe there's going to come some guys during the day with their jack stick, their audio cables that they broke. But when we arrived 30 minutes before our booth opened, we had a feeling. 70 people were standing in line. And the guys in the front had been sleeping there for 12 hours. And we had three speakers ready for sale. So basically, we're the story of a startup that has found a huge gap in the market that we're just trying to fill out now. But we just couldn't keep up with the demand now. Currently, we're raising our seed round to scale up in 2016. And the goal is to expand into Germany and Netherlands and sell 10,000 speakers.