Now in its second year, the German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) is pleased to announce the selection of nine winning companies out of a pool of 50 startups applying. Key executives from these companies will spend three to six months in the heart of Silicon Valley, where they will be paired with industry mentors to seek out lighthouse partners and customers, begin to establish a US team, and test the fundraising waters.
TradeMob, which delivers groundbreaking and market-leading technology in the field of mobile marketing received the “Best of the Best” GSVA’s award.
“Winning the GSVA award allows us to fast-track our US market entry and will give us the high level contacts to gain traction and major market share in the US” said TradeMob CEO, Ravi Kamran.
GSVA also announced the “Fast-Track Program”, which enables TradeMob and Azeti Networks to join the Accelerator immediately, and allows other high-growth companies as soon as they are ready.
The line-up of winning German startups who will make the journey to Silicon Valley are:
- Adtelligence – Next generation Social Marketing & CRM solutions
- Azeti Networks – Platform to interconnect IoT (Internet of Things) devices (e.g. sensors), products and applications
- Celonis – Leading vendor for the analysis of operative process data created by IT systems
- HoneyTracks – Web-based game analytics platforms
- Itembase – social web service to help online shoppers organize, manage and resell their consumer products
- Mobile Event Guide – Mobile trade fairs platform
- Roombeats – Ad network for image
- TradeMob – Mobile app marketing platform
- Ubertweek – Social TV discovery platform
The winning startups were announced at the evening event “Celebrating Innovation”. This new event series in Germany addresses the innovation community and announces the new GSVA startups. The GSVA’s “Celebrating Innovation” event with more than 200 guests will move to a different German city every six months.
The recent evening event was hosted at BMW Lenbachplatz in Munich. The highlight of the evening was the keynote speech by Dr. Hendrik Brandis, Earlybird Co-Founder and Managing Partner, who emphasized that “these are exciting times for starting great companies in Germany, where the innovation landscape is on a major upswing”. He further highlighted the importance of Silicon Valley as an acceleration pad, for German technology companies that need to build and look globally from the start.
Among the speakers was also Christina Sharkey, Head of Commercial Affairs from the US Consulate General Office in Munich, who gave an overview of the strong cooperation between the US and Germany in innovation and startup support.
GSVA is now accepting applications from qualified startups, with the application deadline for the next GSVA round set at March, 15 2013. The next “Celebrating Innovation” event will be in Hamburg on April, 11 2013.