Idea Marathon - Germany

For the second year in a row, we took part in running the eBay Startup Cup competition in Berlin. The concept was designed by GriffinWorx and has been implemented over 200 times in 70+ cities around the world. The competition spanned seven months from June to November of 2018.

67 companies and 39 mentors took part in the “Extreme Build-a-Business” weekend in June, kick-starting the competition. The motto was “Generate revenue now”, and in keeping up with it, 5 teams managed to already earn their first euros during the launch weekend. The most promising 27 teams moved forward in the competition and received multiple rounds of mentoring and pitch training to grow both their ideas and their own caliber and development as founders.  

On 27th of November 2018, following the public pitches, judges identified 3 winning teams – Smart School, TechFuchs and Healtea: 

SmartSchool is a digital smartboard that enables students who miss classes due to unforeseen circumstances to take part in lessons live from home – or from the classroom when a teacher is unable to attend!

Techfuchs uses AI to help corporations optimize their product purchases; their unique algorithm matches the user datasets with corporation datasets, to enable humans to find the best available products for their use cases.

Healtea has created the world’s first clean softdrink: no sugar, artificial sweeteners, additives or artificial flavours, just 100% pure organic ingredients – with great effects on body and mind!

The pool of partners for the Idea Marathon grew to include Barmer, We Are All In Coworking, WLounge and Firma.de.  In addition to the $17 500 prize money provided by eBay Foundation, Firma.de offered to support three winning teams with company registration.