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The Big Score, organised by Scale-Ups.eu, is an exclusive event where VCs and corporate can connect with and source carefully selected scale-ups to invest in and/or partner with, will be taking place in the ridiculously beautiful city of Ghent, Belgium from the 21st until the 23rd of October 2019. What can the investors and corporate dealmakers in attendance expect?
- 75 live pitches of 100% B2B companies - 50 hidden scale-up gems from across Europe - 25 high-growth "Best of Belgium" startups - 20+ targeted one-on-one meetings
"We have been working hard behind the scenes with internationally-recognised VC partners to realise this qualitative line-up of 75 high-growth ‘hidden gems’ from all across Europe. We present real game changers, rapidly, representing the future of European tech from mobility-as-a-service to production quality control and leading cybersecurity players from more than 13 countries."
"By bringing together growth-stage scale-ups, VCs and buyers for 3 days, Scale-Ups.eu succeeds in squeezing time and enabling growth for these key players in our ecosystem,” said Bruno Vandegehuchte, project manager for The Big Score.
Already 150+ international ‘big fish’ later-stage VCs have confirmed including Atomico, Bessemer Ventures, SmartFin, 8 Roads, Accel, Index, Vitruvian, Partech, Battery, Runa Capital, Skolkovo Ventures Columbia Lake Partners, Iris Capital, Frog Capital, Sofina, Orange Ventures, Fortino, Inven, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Microsoft Ventures, Volta, Inkef Capital, Xpand, and dozens more.
What I personally like about The Big Score is its focus. I'm not saying there's no room for conferences, festivals, summits and other 'event experiences' with inspiring keynotes, visionary storytellers, futuristic tech demos, panels on quantum supremacy, philosophical debates, discussions on ethics and meaning, musical and poetry intermezzo's, yoga parties and meditation sessions.
The Big Score, though, is all about matching the best B2B startups with investors and corporate dealmakers to provide a platform for inking deals. That's it.
Take for example omni:us, which develops powerful AI that can read, process and understand a wide variety of documents. That's useful technology for a myriad of things, but the Berlin startup identified the insurance industry as one of the sectors where the need for it was most pressing.
Omni:us founder and CEO Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss tells me insurance companies still have to process on a daily basis a multitude of different, inconsistent and often handwritten documents with sensitive information, and that their solution can help with faster, more individual and empathic resolution of insurance claims.
At The Big Score, the startup will look to meet with insurance and other financial services companies, as well as investors, to take its business to the next level.
Another European scale-up participating in the event with similar goals is Vulog, which enables third parties with technology and expertise to launch efficient and profitable car-sharing and scooter-sharing services around the world.
Its beginnings date back to 2006, when there was not really a market for that sort of thing yet, but that has changed and in 2015 the French company raised funding to develop its business. That was also the year Vulog's CEO, Gregory Ducongé, came on board, and since then the startup has turned into a scale-up with more than 100 staff and customers in 5 continents/30 cities across the globe.
The company will be presenting its SaaS-based solution for shared mobility services at The Big Score, as it looks to create more alliances with car makers and other players in the automotive tech industry.
Finally, let's shine a light on another scale-up that will be participating in The Big Score in a month: SCADAfence, an Israeli company that was founded in 2014 when there was a noticeable increase in cyber attacks on vulnerable industrial networks.
SCADAfence has since developed a solid cybersecurity platform designed to keep complex, large-scale operational technology networks running smoothly by reducing risks and mitigating threats.
Started by two co-founders who were previously part of a military intelligence unit that dealt specifically with those kinds of threats to industrial networks, SCADAfence today works with a myriad of companies in sectors like IT, automotive, energy, smart cities, food and beverage, pharma, building management and infrastructure.
As its CEO Elad Ben-Meir told me in a phone interview, "the bad guys are not really picky' when it comes to attack targets", so there's growing demand for the kind of cybersecurity solutions SCADAfence provides.
If you would like to meet these scale-ups, and many more of its caliber and scale, check out the details for The Big Score now and hopefully see you in Belgium next month!
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