Introduction: The winners of the Pitch Award
Many great teams took part in this year's EA event series. We would like to introduce you to the 3 best teams that convinced the jury and won a lot of prizes like up to 1500€ cash, 5000€ media budget from der brutkasten, IP-Strategy-Consulting by AWS, workshops and mentoring sessions and many more.
Epiclay - 1st place at the Pitch Award
One team prevailed and won the Pitch Award at the conference. We would like to introduce you to this team and its great startup EPICLAY.🚀
Epiclay wants to make living green walls accessible to everyone by building a modular solution, which draws on a special material and plant mixture and thus allows to reduce maintenance costs to a minimum. Epiclay tiles can be used both outdoor, as well as for indoor facade greening projects. This allows them not only to bring nature back to our cities, but also to fight air pollution and the Urban Heat Island Effect. Indoors, green walls also increase physical and mental wellbeing, for example by reducing stress.
Their main advantage, compared to traditional green walls, lies in the lightweight system, which can be achieved by allowing plants to grow without any soil needed, as well as the low maintenance costs, amongst other things because we draw on especially robust plants.
However, the main asset which they base their operations on is their international and transdisciplinary team of biologists (France), architects and designers (Spain, Mexico), as well as business developers (Austria). They are driven by their strongly aligned vision to bring nature back to the cities and make living green walls accessible to everyone. If you want to follow them on their journey, have any questions regarding their product or simply want to say hi – they would be delighted to see you on their Instagram (epiclay.eu), website (https://www.epiclay.eu/) or just send them a mail (hornik@epiclay.eu)!
C:aire - 2nd place at the Pitch Award
The second place at the Pitch Award went to C:aire. C:aire wants to make every breath worth breathing. Did you know that we spend on average 90% of our time indoors? But what are we breathing? This is an essential question for our well-being (not onlyduring a pandemic). At the moment there are no sustainable solutions on the market to fight indoor air pollution and odours. Their competitors either emphasize only the efficiency or provide a sustainable solution with low impact. C:aire is working towards air purification goals through biological filtration. They are building a filter that would eliminate unhealthy particles in the air with the help of bacteria.
This way they can consolidate the existing trade off between efficiency and sustainability. With the usage of different bacteria cultivated in the filter, they offer customized solutions for multiple kinds of odours with an efficiency compared to 1000 plants per square meter. Their business model builds on a one time installation price with additional revenue streams generated through services. This team is confident that they will make it happen, as they combine passion with multidisciplinary backgrounds in business, biology and architecture. Follow them on Facebook (we.caire) and Instagram (we.caire) and keep updated about their progress.🚀
QuestEd - Winner of the audience voting at the Pitch Award
QuestEd school is a tool that helps teachers engage students in the classroom. The product uses gamification technologies to keep students entertained, and the teacher receives statistics about their performance.
This is how it works: the ball is equipped with a NFC reader and Bluetooth. The students will wear a NFC wristband, and throw the QuestEd Ball to each other. Once the ball comes into proximity with a wristband, the system knows which student answers. Once the teacher hears the answer of a student, he presses correct/incorrect button. The system is adaptive and can be used for any subject. After class, the teacher is presented with the collected performance analytics and recommendations. Teachers can see which questions were hard for particular students, and how long it took them to answer.
The QuestEd team believes that education should be fun for everyone, and they want to give teachers more tools and freedom in the classroom. Currently we they are working on the final version of their product, and they aim to finish it for the upcoming academic year. If you have any suggestions or ideas about collaboration you can send them an e-mail: contact@questedschool.com.
You can follow their journey on LinkedIn (quested-school), Facebook (QuestEdSchool) and Instagram (quest.ed).
Great ideas, great teams - we wish them all the best for the future and are looking forward to hear more soon!🔥
Text: Isabella Egger