Jenny Konings, Author at YES!Delft

Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship and YES!Delft join forces to connect young talents to the world of startups and scaleups

Written by Jenny Konings on June 10, 2021. Posted in News.

Talents United is an initiative by the two incubators from Erasmus University Rotterdam and TU Delft to connect talents to startups and scaleups and prepare them to establish and grow the leading companies of tomorrow.

Over the past ten years, the number of support programmes for students and starting entrepreneurs offered by our own incubators has grown impressively. While this is a great achievement, these programmes were largely developed with our own target audience in mind. As a result, we see that at present there is an insufficient exchange between startup teams coming out of our universities. This leads to a lack of diversity in skill sets, which we believe to be crucial to solve the pressing issues of today and to realize a better future.

In order to break down the boundaries between the alpha, beta, gamma and medical sciences, Talents United will facilitate the creation of more multidisciplinary startup teams. We do this by actively connecting students from different backgrounds to each other and to the startups and scaleups active in the region. By joining the Talents United community, students and young professionals have a direct and personal link to both YES!Delft and Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship. We offer personal advice to connect talents to the right opportunity or network, provide services that boost multidisciplinary collaborations and collect relevant entrepreneurship opportunities from our partner network in a monthly newsletter.

“What I hope to see in five years is that all startup teams coming out of our incubators each include team members from different study fields and universities.” – Martin Luxemburg, Director Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship

Talents United is part of the broader strategy of Erasmus University to stimulate and accelerate entrepreneurship on and across campus via its new entity, Erasmus Enterprise, which includes Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship, YES!Delft and ERBS. Through this collaboration, we want to broaden students’ horizons and excite them about the entrepreneurial opportunities that exist outside of their own fields of study and traditional career paths. To that end, Erasmus Enterprise channels all existing entrepreneurship activities on campus and enables students to navigate the entrepreneurial landscape.

Opening up the ecosystem networks of Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship and YES!Delft, Talents United functions as a matchmaker on – and beyond – the campuses of Erasmus University, Erasmus MC and TU Delft. With 40.000 students, internationally acclaimed research and education activities and programmes in all disciplines, it is only a logical next step in becoming the world’s leading universities for solving pressing issues. Together with the efforts of Erasmus Enterprise that support the connection between talents and new businesses, Talents United is also committed to strengthening the regional innovation ecosystem in South Holland.

“We want to enable startups and scaleups in the region to easily source talent from our universities so they will stay in the region while growing their businesses. This is crucial to ensure the competitiveness of province South Holland.” – EJ Lugt, Managing Director YES!Delft

Do you want to get connected to the world of startups and scaleups?

JOIN TALENTS UNITED HERE

Meet the Investor Readiness Program Batch 2020

Written by Jenny Konings on November 17, 2020. Posted in News, Online, YES!Funded.

Meet the startups of our Investor Readiness Program

Six startups are currently enrolled in our Investor Readiness Program. In 10-weeks they get all the tools to be attractive from an investor’s perspective and to obtain the necessary funds to further accelerate! After previous successes, and numerous requests, YES!Funded also started to welcome startups outside our ecosystem to the program! Scroll down, get to know them a bit better, and find out how they experienced the program so far.

PATS Indoor Drone Solutions

PATS Indoor Drone Solutions is automating insect control for horticulture with their Bat-like Drones.

“Investor readiness is much more than a fancy slide deck. You have to make the switch from selling your company to building the case for investors such that they see the long-term potential and have no other want than to be part of this journey together with the startup team.

The program gives great insights into all aspects that are relevant to building this case, with great and detailed support and guidance by the YES!Funded team.”

Cuurios

Asset-intensive industries struggle to inspect, maintain, and repair their assets in a coordinated and timely way. Their business-as-usual collaboration solutions (e.g. E-mail, Microsoft Excel, Power BI) are reactive, highly dependent on human input, or lack data context. This leads to avoidable production losses, asset downtime, or quality issues.

The software product of Cuurios is a collaborative environment to organize, track, and manage asset related actions, turbo charged by data.

“The first three weeks of the YES!Delft Investor Readiness Program were inspiring and intense and it gave us valuable insights on the investors perspective, our elevator pitch, and much more… Cuurios is now 2 years successful in business and we believe this program will help us prepare and present an appealing investment opportunity!”

Interested to know more about this startup’s experience in the program? Read all about it in the extensive blogpost they wrote.

Keep on reading

Lynk

Lynk is embedding quality control intuitively into your projects’ digital workflow.

“Even amidst Corona, Carola, Jan Geert, and Bianca have managed to make the Investor Readiness Program feel personal and inclusive. The masterclasses have been on-point and have nudged us to look beyond technology and product metrics. We are looking forward to making our business case full-circle and getting in touch with investors.”

Mavin

The purpose of the media has always been to hold governments and organizations accountable. But who holds the media accountable? Mavin believes it should be you. Especially now! Mavin will be an ecosystem of crowd-sourced, reputation-based, rating, and commenting tools to enable internet users to instantly recognize the trustworthiness of content they read, share, or engage in. This will help to restore online trust, fight misinformation, bad bots, and trolls while offering publishers additional engagement, traffic, and revenue.

“We applied to join the Investor Readiness Program to improve how we target, present to, and connect with investors. The first weeks have been focused on getting the basics in order to target investors, while the second part of the program is more focused on the in-depth knowledge required when connecting to investors.

We received great feedback on our pitch deck, not only from the YES!Delft team, but also from the Entrepreneurs in Residence which are part of YES!Delft. Especially those connections, to seasoned entrepreneurs and investors are most useful and relevant to us and we are looking forward to a lot more inspiring conversations.”

BodyGraph

BodyGraph designed The Textile Coach, a smart undershirt that provides accurate body monitoring and gives actionable advice.

“During the first three weeks, we already got so many new insights from the YES!Delft team and the other participants. We now know what investor-ready truly means. We are looking forward to putting the things we learned into practice and pitch for the ‘friendly’ investors, later on in the program.”

Olivia

Olivia brings inexpensive wireless data fuels to the next wave of innovation. An explosion in affordable hardware makes gathering data possible in ways it wasn’t before. Communicating data wirelessly remains costly and painful. Olivia changes that, by becoming the world’s first mobile network operator for smart devices.

Are you an investor looking for investment opportunities in these startups or would you just like to get to know them even better? Join the Investor Day!

Startups present their solutions at the Pitch Day of EIT Health Validation Lab

Written by Jenny Konings on November 8, 2020. Posted in MedTech, News.

The EIT Health Pitch Day marked the end of this year’s EIT Health Validation Lab, and sent 17 early-stage MedTech startups into the market. The event was held entirely online on October 27 and gave teams a chance to pitch their innovation to our network. Lifelet Medical took the coveted first prize.

“The Validation Lab was a great experience for Lifelet Medical, where we received excellent domain-specific mentorship and coaching. It was an honor to work with all of the startups, and we are delighted for the opportunity to advance to the central pitch competition and to accelerate our technology further”, says Elle Sander, co-founder of Lifelet Medical.

A partnership between EIT Health & YES!Delft

EIT Health Validation Lab is a partnership between YES!Delft and EIT Health. The two organizations join forces to offer early-stage companies an opportunity to validate their technology as best as possible, and combine YES!Delft’s startup expertise with the extensive knowledge and network of EIT Health.

Over the course of eight weeks, the two parties provided the right tooling and coaching to startups to develop their skills to validate their riskiest business assumptions, to sharpen their problem-solution-fit, and find their product-market-fit. The Validation Lab is designed to help promising MedTech teams get in touch with mentors and industry specialists already early on.

Solving a severe and relevant problem

Lifelet Medical, the winner of this edition, is on an ambitious yet very important mission. The team aims to improve the lives of patients with heart valve disease by developing fully synthetic durable and sustainable heart valve leaflets for life.

“Lifelet is solving a severe problem that is very relevant worldwide, they have a unique innovation and an excellent team,” said Evert Jaap Lugt, Managing Director of YES!Delft, when he announced the startup as the winner.

“We would like to thank all the startups and ecosystem partners for their ongoing enthusiasm throughout the program. I’m very curious to see what the future holds for these game-changers, I have very high expectations after everything we’ve seen so far”, says MedTech Program Manager, Claire Visser.

Author: Jenny Konings

Talents United is an initiative by the two incubators from Erasmus University Rotterdam and TU Delft to connect talents to startups and scaleups and prepare them to establish and grow the leading companies of tomorrow.

“What I hope to see in five years is that all startup teams coming out of our incubators each include team members from different study fields and universities.” – Martin Luxemburg, Director Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship

“We want to enable startups and scaleups in the region to easily source talent from our universities so they will stay in the region while growing their businesses. This is crucial to ensure the competitiveness of province South Holland.” – EJ Lugt, Managing Director YES!Delft

Do you want to get connected to the world of startups and scaleups?

It’s has been a busy month at YES!Delft – we kicked off our Accelerator Program, AI/Blockchain Validation Lab and our very first SocialTech Validation Lab! And our startups have been hustling too!

1. Ampelmann

2. Momo Medical

3. YoooM

4. Qlayers

5. Physee

6. Bi/ond

7. Breeze

8. Gerrard Street

9. PATS Indoor Drone Solutions

10. Startups in the media

Spring has arrived and our startups are in full bloom! Somnox, Breeze and STIL all made great tv appearances, and Manometric and Dawn Aerospace secured investments! Curious about these and other stories? Read on in this month’s Top 10 Startup Success Stories!

4. Solar Monkey

2021 only just started but we already have so many great success stories from our startups to share with you! From new projects and products to investment announcements and winning prizes. Read on and find out all about the January Startup Success Stories from our tech incubator!

5. SenseGlove & STIL

The Holidays are around the corner, which means we are almost ready to wrap up 2020. One could think there would be fewer successes to share, but look at all the achievements from our startups that took place in November! Keep on reading and find out all about this.

Meet the startups of our Investor Readiness Program

PATS Indoor Drone Solutions

Cuurios

Lynk

Mavin

BodyGraph

Olivia

A partnership between EIT Health & YES!Delft

Solving a severe and relevant problem

There are only 2 months left until we round up this year, and what a year was 2020 so far! One could think there would be fewer nominations, collaborations, and grants secured, but check out all the achievements from our startups in this month’s success stories!

7. Academic Startup Competition

10. Get in the Ring – Impact Competition

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