Student Startup Camp brought new ideas to life

Student Startup Camp was held in Tartu last week for a 5th successful time. Garage48, the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science and IdeaLab provided an excellent working atmosphere for the 100 students taking part in the camp, who had a busy week of building ideas into prototypes.

Camp started on Monday at the SPARK Hub Tartu where students from all over Estonia gathered, pitched 16 ideas and formed teams around 11 of them. During the next days, teams had many mentors helping them understand more about entrepreneurship and startups. Mentors covered subjects from the concept of a Minimum Viable Product to the importance of teamwork to “dirty tricks” for. Campers also had guest mentors like Liis Narusk (ELEVATE), Triin Kask (Nevercode), Richard Murutar (Sprayprinter) and Roland Kriibi (Pipedrive) giving them advice. Several founders also stopped by to share their stories of starting their companies from hackathons and start-up competitions.

At the final presentation on Friday, the jury had to make the tough decision of determining the best brand-new ideas. The jury consisted of Maret Ahonen (UT IdeaLab), Anne Jääger (UT, Institute of Computer science), Sven Parkel (UT, Centre for entrepreneurship and innovation), Jüri Kaljundi (Garage48, Weekdone) and Maret Kurve (Garage48, Testlio).

Judges selected team Recipery as the winner. Recipery is an app providing a recipe sharing service with ingredient home delivery. The team leader is Sebastian Värv, members were Agu-Art Annuk, Maria Belinska, Abdulateef Olamide Alli, Oliver Ossip, Hippolyte-Fayol Toulassi, Els Maria Metsamaa, Kristi Koppel, Leene Künnap, Eva Nebula and Clive Tinashe Mawoko.

Second place was awarded to team StartART, which is the first platform dedicated to students' artwork, which they can share and sell on the platform. Customers can browse and buy a wide variety of student's artworks. Team leader is Georg Vann, members: Maali Tars, Age Roosi, Magnar Vares, Risto Puronen. Humair Kazi, Örge Edgü, Aaliyah Wesker and Shaswata Saha.

UT student Khaled Charkie from team EziPort summed up the week very positively: “The camp was not only a great experience, but a chance to team up with people of different talents and turn ideas into reality in a short period of time.“

The Student Startup Camp was supported by HITSA and IT Academy.

Article referred from the Garage48 blog.