Slush 2017: Charm of the 10th Time
The world’s leading startup and technology conference Slush was organized for the 10th this November. The sold-out event gathered up to 20,000 attendees from over 130 countries including 2,600 startups, 1,500 investors and 600 journalists to Helsinki. This thrill led to nearly 10,000 meetups between startups and investors. Some 2,400 volunteers made all of this possible.
During the Slush week Helsinki attracted tech-heads from around the globe. The stage was taken by the most prominent influencers in tech such as Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures, Martin Lau, President of Tencent, Leila Janah, Founder & CEO of Samasource & LMXI, and Adena Friedman, President & CEO of Nasdaq.
Prestigious appearances were also seen by President of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, former Vice President, Al Gore, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Prince Daniel, and France’s digital minister, Mounir Mahjoubi.
The narrative of Slush 2017 was focused on the balances between utopia and phobia, and how entrepreneurs can solve the biggest problems of the world with the help of technology. As every year, the goal was to help startups to succeed.This was accomplished by setting up almost 10,000 meetings between investors and startups. Each speaker also contributed at least one hour of their time to help the early-stage startups through 1-on-1 mentoring and roundtable discussions.
During the first day, we saw many notable launches including Varjo’s anticipated Bionic Display™, Oura’s sleep cycle monitoring ring, and the State of European Tech report by Atomico and Slush.
Slush gathered over 2,600 startups, with the most popular fields being those of analytics and big data. We also saw an increasing interest in companies working with AI. The second day culminated in the Slush 100 Pitching Competition. After an intense competition, Altum Technologies managed to snatch the first place with their winning idea of offering a solution to cleaning industrial equipment without having to shut down production.