17 new business ideas from really diverse fields like Technology, Creative Industries or Biotechnology/Sea Industries got into the third edition of the 6 month acceleration program promoted by UPTEC (Science and Technology Park of University of Porto). This program aims to help entrepreneurs with their major challenges and provide tools to validate their ideas.

After 6 months of training and hard work, the time to show the results has come and UPTEC has put together an open session, 3rd Startup Pitch Day, where everyone could see the entrepreneurs in action. So, last 29 September, I went to the Faculty of Engineering – University of Porto (FEUP), to check out this new batch of projects.

In the jury panel we could find a mix of academic and industry well known names, but besides the judging panel, 25 investors were there as well looking for partnerships and potential investments.

After several pitching rounds, with some stand up comedy and networking breaks in the middle, the time to announce the big winner of the day came. Crowbar, an application that automatically traces the location of bugs in software got the jury’s attention and ended up winning the Pitch competition. Crowbar states that they are the only tool able to predict where a bug can be found and they have proven to be able to reduce the amount of time spent finding bugs up to 75%. The idea came from a research project developed at FEUP.

Besides the winner, 3 other projects were also rewarded:

• Still Urban Design, a project for bioclimatic rehabilitation of public spaces, got a special mention on creative industries.
• Sky Angel, a drone aimed at the prevention and rescue at sea was awarded with the Biotechnology / Sea special mention.
• Beauti, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to manage and schedule beauty and wellness services, managed to get the special mention for the technology category.

The crowd attending the pitch day also had the opportunity to pick a favorite and InfraSpeak was the chosen team. They aim to allow you to organize and reduce bureaucracy within the process of infrastructure and equipment maintenance.

Interested to know more about the rest of the teams? Here they are:

• Scraim – project management software
• Flicks – warning sensors for forest fires
• Melus – promotion of products of fungal nature
• Digital Soul Games – videogames
• Creative Boards – online meeting point for creative people and SMEs
• Matter – reuse of Portuguese agroindustrial byproducts using Design
• SIMI – restaurant menus in tablet format integrated with the kitchen
• Theatre for Entrepreneurs – theater techniques for corporate and professional environments
• IDOcare – marketplace for geriatric services
• Musa – recovery projects for artisanal production of classical hydraulic mosaic work
• Portfolio Market – online service for selection and optimization of investment portfolios
• emotion – electric kit that turns a regular bike into an electric one