Taking place just before the start of Summer on June 2nd - 3rd in Helsinki, ArcticStartup, the media and events company behind the event, hopes to showcase the next stars of the Nordic startup scene.
Arctic15 is the largest startup event in the Nordics, and claims to be the most exciting startup event in Northern Europe.
Highlights of the event this year
This year’s focus is on health, food technology, cloud services, virtual reality and fintech.
Dmitri Sarle of ArcticStartup says to Forbes:
“Most events are pushed to become bigger, because the bigger you are, the more money you make. We want to create a place where people can network and meet anybody they want. What that means is an interesting balance.”
Arctic15 will be held at the Cable Factory in Helsinki on June 2–3. Alongside 2000+ attendees, there will 75 speakers, 200+ investors, 400+ startups, and 100+ corporations participating in the event, as well as 3500+ one-on-one meetings between investors and startups taking place.
Among the first speakers announced are investors like "King of AngelList," Gil Penchina, who has over 3000 angel investor networks, as well as Marcos Battisti, managing director of Intel Capital.
The speakers also include Vice President of the European Commission, Andrus Ansip, and CTO of Cisco, Monique Morrow.
Tim Draper among the speakers
Speakers in the FinTech space at the event include Tim Draper, founder of the venture capital firms, Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), the former of which invested in startups including Twitch.TV, YeePay, IndieGogo, Docusign, Parametric Technology, and AngelList, and the latter in Skype, Hotmail, Tesla, Baidu, Theranos, and Overture, among many others.
He has been listed as #46 of the most outstanding Harvard alumni, #7 on the Forbes Midas List, #1 Most Networked Venture Capitalist by Always On, and #98 on the 2014 Worth Magazine 100 Most Powerful People in Finance. He has won numerous awards and honors and is regularly featured in the press as a leading supporter of entrepreneurship.
A proud supporter of financial innovation, and Bitcoin in particular, Draper was “the sole winner of the first US government auction of nearly 30,000 BTC (then valued at roughly $18m) held last July, again purchasing 2,000 BTC (worth $750,000) in an auction of 50,000 BTC held in December 2014” as part of the seizure and subsequent auction of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of The Silk Road’s funds.
Tim Draper says to Bloomberg:
“Bitcoin has the potential to transform the world the way the Internet did back in the days. The Internet itself has this weird baggage around. As we got more and more comfortable with it, it became a bigger and bigger part of our lives. And I think the same things are going to happen with Bitcoin. Eventually it will find its place.”
Marvin Liao and 500 Startups
In addition, Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, will be in attendance. The seed fund and internet startup accelerator invested a substantial sum in five Bitcoin startups last year.
Each of the five Bitcoin companies received $100,000 in capital. GoGoCoin, a Bitcoin gift card retailer that hopes to increase adoption; Bonafide.io, an anonymous transaction ratings provider which allows users to build up a reputation score; Coinalytics, a service that brings real-time data to users via information analytics and news aggregation; Neuroware, an HTML5 wallet provider that stores private keys in the user's brain using distributed deterministic components; and Monetsu, payment processing developers, all received investment.
Introducing Northern Europe’s best startups
In previous years, the Arctic15 pitching contest has introduced several of Northern Europe's most well known startups to a wider audience.
Among others, Kiosked, Vault, Pipedrive, Infogr.am, Yousician and Transfluent have competed in the contest, raising a total of 99 million euros.
Finland also has a rich technological history, and the “venue [the Cable Factory in Helsinki] is a key part of Finnish tech history – it’s the site where Slush grew into the phenomena it is and where local conglomerate Nokia first ventured into the telecoms business.”
Sarle says:
“We realized that we wanted to deliver value, first and foremost. That’s why we are capping our sales physically to 1,200 people. We’re not going to have more than that. This is the main thing, we want people to meet.”
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