Physical events and real meetings – that is definitely the one reason why to attend TechChill 2022. And the other one is amazing content. And, of course, an opportunity to meet unicorns face to face. Here’s a sneak peek into this year’s agenda.
There are three main pillars that all the agenda is built on. The first one is sustainability where we will talk also about survivalists. The second pillar is neo humans and everything around human and technology interaction. This is where we also will focus on health tech, edtech, gaming. And the last but not least – outliers and everything around startups building their products, selling and growing as well as investors investing in them.
The hottest unicorns from the region
TechChill is a boutique event where you can meet and greet everyone – be it a startup, investor, speaker, or media representative. Or even a unicorn. By the way, we will have some of the hottest unicorn representatives taking part in the event this year.
The local startup scene is going to be represented by currently the one and only unicorn in Latvia Printful. We will welcome CEO of the company Davis Siksnans on the stage. The big Estonian unicorn family will be represented by Bolt, Veriff, and Pipedrive. Lithuanians – by their unicorn Vinted.
Bolt, Veriff and Vinted representatives will join the panel and will discuss the journey to 10 billion and beyond. The case study of Vinted is going to be explored in detail by two investors Julian von Eckartsberg and John Greger from Burda Principal Investments. They will try to identify what was important for the company in the process of becoming a unicorn.
Web3 and NFT
This is hot. And we are going to have local as well as international stars of the future talking about the topic. Meet Arturs Kirtovskis who is the co-founder of the company Sigle. He recently announced that he successfully raised 500 000 EUR for his startup via NFT. “I think that the best explanation of web3 is the internet that belongs to users and not tech companies. If existing web infrastructures are oriented toward creating profit for tech companies then web3 is going to be all about users and their ability to generate profit for themselves. It is not a utopia anymore. It is reality. And NFT is part of this reality. I’ll share our story in TechChill on how we raised money through NFT and how this model is different from other traditional investment models,” says Arturs.
TechChill 2022 organized an event on this topic at Twitter Spaces where Arturs was joined by Ethan Pierse and you will have an opportunity to meet him in person at TechChill 2022. He is the Founding Partner of Borderless Ventures, director of The CryptoAssets Institute, evangelizing the Business of Blockchain and the Tokenized Economy. Ethan is also the host of the Blockchain Economy newsletter and podcast at cryptoassets.substack.com with more than 20 000 subscribers.
Sustainability and diversity
These two topics have been on a startup agenda for some time now. We will dig deeper into them by discussing, for example, how to reduce the gender gap in VC funding, how not to forget about sustainability while investing, and what is impact investing.
One of the hottest startups fighting for sustainability in the region is Single.Earth from Estonia that last year raised $7.9 million seed round. Startup tokenizes the world’s nature to protect it. Single.Earth creates financial incentives for landowners to keep their forests growing and other natural resources intact. “At TechChill I am going to talk about building a nature-backed economy, and how our nature-backed currency will enable the transformation to a fully sustainable future. I’d love to meet other entrepreneurs tackling some of the biggest challenges humans are facing today – like climate change, biodiversity loss, health, and others. TechChill is a unique opportunity to meet with other entrepreneurs, investors, and players in the space, build new relationships and catch up with old friends,” says Co-founder and CEO Merit Valdsalu.
Both topics are relevant to the startup community as well as corporations so we have invited both parties to talk about it. Circle K Latvia, the service station chain, will share their experience in cooperation with the Latvian startup Koffeco. They together are recycling coffee waste to produce fuel in the form of coffee briquettes. Whereas Michael Haase Founder and CEO of Plant Jammer will share his experience while working with the retail store chain RIMI. Plant Jammer educates and inspires people to eat sustainably in their homes while helping food brands, retailers, veggie box players, and influencers activate their tribes.
One more speaker that we would like to emphasize under these topics is Sebastian Greiss. He has 8+ years of experience in innovation and corporate venturing in large organizations as well as experience in next47 – a global venture firm with $1bn funding. Based on that vast knowledge, he relaunched StationX at Siemens Mobility towards a venture collaboration service to bridge the world between entrepreneurs and corporates to create game-changing partnerships.
Edtech
At this year’s TechChill 2022 let’s talk more about our future – namely education technologies. Ayaz Karimov is a doctoral researcher and product manager in edtech. In his speech, he will talk about gamification elements in education. Martin Sjöstrand will represent his company Lexplore, which has developed the first fully objective reading assessment, which by combining the latest in AI and eye-tracking technology, can analyse a child’s skills across key reading components, determine their attainment, and highlight specific difficulties in a matter of minutes.
Despite the recent shocking events in Ukraine, the team of TechChill is working on the program. Every week new speakers approve that they are willing to attend so stay tuned and let’s meet in person very soon!