Play Canvas Wins The Knock-Out Fight At Startup AddVenture Summit In Kiev

Startup AddVenture Summit is a new conference to hit the European circuit. Unusually, it’s run in Kiev, Ukraine, which turns out to be a rather good idea because Russians can easily travel there without a Visa, and so can Western Europeans, as can many people from Central and Eastern Europe and CIS countries. That said, most of the startups were from the CEE/CIS region, which is generating a lot of heat at the moment – a topic I’ll be returning to in due course. And like all tech conferences these days it features a tech startup pitch competition – in this case themed around a boxing match. TechCrunch was there to check the companies out and here’s what we found.

Cutting to the chase: the winner of the event was Play Canvas (UK, AngelList). This is a “cloud-hosted game development platform” with is a collaborative editing tool with a rich community site. It’s a pretty spectacular site for creating an sharing games across any platform. Worth checking out. It has been incubated at TechStars London.

They get a a €25,000 convertible note investment from 500 Startups and Cross Border Angels and a kickass boxing belt (pictured).

The runner up was Lead Scanner (Russia/Ukraine, AngelList). This is a lead generation tool which helps small and medium business (SMB) owners find prospective clients in social media and boost sales. Using proprietary algorithms, LeadScanner finds social media users who have an intent to buy specific products or services. It has been incubated at the Skolkovo IT Cluster in Moscow.

Applications to the competition were run through Angel List since April, which indicates that there was some decent filtering going on. The rules were that the companies had to have raised less than $2 million and be a European company.

They got over 500 applications, and after 35 semi finalists were interviewed, 10 finalists were selected. They then went to Kiev a week ago for three days of pitch training with event founder Vitaly Golomb.

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Here are the rest of the finalists and how they describe themselves.

Concept Inbox (Spain, AngelList)
“Concept inbox is a web tool that lets designers to share their work with their clients and get feedback from them quickly.”
Incubator: Wayra Spain

Priceless.ly (Italy – Russian/Ukrainian Team, AngelList)
“Pricelessly is an exposure-producing and fundraising platform that enables influential figures (celebrities) to mobilize their fans to raise funding and awareness for social causes, as well as widely engage and incentivize their fan-base with minimum effort.”
Incubator: TechPeaks

Landinghi (Poland, AngelList)
“Landingi is an app that helps you create landing pages for many marketing campaign purpose without designer and web developer.”
Incubator: Innovation Nest

Jumpido (Bulgaria, AngelList)
“Jumpido is an educational software product that combines primary school maths, game-based learning and natural user interface. It is focused on transforming the way children learn mathematics in school and the approach teachers take to engage their classes with this interesting, but challenging subject.”
Incubator: LAUNCHub

Limk (Turkey, AngelList)
“Limk is a content distribution and discovery platform that helps websites grow traffic while reaching highly engaged audiences. Websites can bring qualified new users&#8212those most likely to engage&#8212to their own sites by exposing their content on contextually similar sites at Limk Shuffle.”
Incubator: none

Advice Wallet (Ukraine, AngelList)
“Advice Wallet is a mobile loyalty program to attract, keep and understand customers. It empowers any local business to create a customized acquisition and loyalty program online in minutes.”
Incubator: Happy Farm

InHiro (Slovakia, AngelList)
“Professionals don’t browse through job portals – get to them via social networks. With InHiro, you’re able to create an innovative job ad (template creator), share it through social neworks (gamification based mechanics) and manage candidates (funnel talents through each step of your hiring process).”
Incubator: None

Moku (Italy, AngelList)
“Moku provides a common space to store and find documents, take rich notes (highlightings, text annotations, drawings) and collaborate with their classmates (while respecting their privacy, too), just with a browser. A “moku” is a collection of documents, where every document is securely stored on the cloud and available on any devices. It can be annotated on transparent layers (as if they were pieces of tracing paper) that don’t modify the original document. Annotations can stay private or can be shared with other users with read or write permission.”
Incubator: H-Farm