On July 20th, Meta's Warsaw office hosted a Pitch Day. Startups presented their businesses to the top investment funds in the CEE region. The Pitch Day marked the end of the two-month Genesis StartUp Academy program together with Meta. There were twenty-one selected tech startups from the CEE region that participated in the Pitch Day. They focused on scaling and managing a tech business in the free online Genesis StartUp Academy with Meta program.
«For Meta in CEE, it is an important priority to support startups. We have launched StartUp Academy with the Ukrainian IT company Genesis for the past three years to provide even more startups with knowledge, ideas, and mentoring from leading technology experts,» stated Stanislav Birov, Meta’s Client Partner in the CEE region.
Entrepreneurs in the IT industry gained insight from the founders of global companies over the course of two months. As part of the mentoring program, they also received support from experts at Genesis, Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Horizon Capital, Flyer One Ventures, Deel, Zendesk, and other market leaders in their respective fields.
«As the tech industry experiences a «venture winter» – which results in a significant decrease in investment volume, including in the CEE region – StartUp Academy team this year focuses on helping founders with growth opportunities identification and venture capital access. Genesis and Meta acted as intermediaries between ideas and capital, bringing together 20+ startups and more than 40 venture capital funds on Pitch Day,» commented Artem Kopanyev, COO of Genesis.
In StartUp Academy, Pitch Day is the final stage. This year, 20+ promising startups from Ukraine, Estonia, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan presented their businesses to investors at Pitch Day. The event was attended by 46 representatives of the region's largest venture capital funds. Here is a list of some participating funds: Flyer One Ventures, Horizon Capital, SMOK Ventures, Inovo VC, Market One Capital, TA Ventures, Practica Capital, 500 Emerging Europe, ffVC, and more.
In partnership with Meta, Genesis organized StartUp Academy for the third time since 2020. Each year, 50 selected technology startups, from the Central and Eastern European region and at different stages of development from Edtech, Fintech, B2B SaaS, and mobile applications, are invited to participate. In three seasons of the program, there have been over 5,000 applications from 60+ countries, and over 120 startups have participated in the program, gaining experience from the best tech teams in Europe.
As a result of last year’s academy, a total of six businesses secured investments between 2022 and 2023, ranging from $100,000 to $1 million.
Additionally, Genesis StartUp Academy organizers and partners, together with Meta, provide approximately $5.5 million in non-monetary support to participating startups, including credits for cloud services, free access to products and services, and consultations.
The new wave of Genesis StartUp Academy, in partnership with Meta, will launch soon. To learn more about the program and the terms of participation, please visit the website.
