This article was published on September 18, 2012

Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator’s first graduates head to Silicon Valley


Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator’s first graduates head to Silicon Valley

Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator, one of the many, many startup accelerators in Europe, is taking the first class of startups who’ve graduated from its six-month program stateside this month.

The accelerator, which counts Amazon CTO Werner Vogels among its startup mentors, will be showcasing its first batch of startups (see list below) in Silicon Valley on the 20th of September, followed by a panel discussion about “The Future of the European Startup Community”. Sounds riveting!

In all seriousness, the Q&A panel session will include European entrepreneurs like Guillaume Decugis, who sold Musiwave for $125 million and is currently co-founder and CEO of Scoop.it, and Unity Technologies co-founder and CEO David Helgason (read our interview with him).

These kinds of trips usually yield good returns for participating startups, although it may have been wiser of Rockstart to have started reaching out to the Bay Area tech community and press a little earlier.

Anyway, the Rockstart startups have already been in the States for two weeks now, working out of RocketSpace and networking with VCs, angel investors and other startups in between mentorship sessions at Mozilla, Google, Blackbox, and the Dutch Consulate.

If you’re going to the Demo Day in Silicon Valley, these are the startups you’ll be hearing from:

Peerby: Peerby enables people to rent goods in their neighborhood and just won over 100,000 euros at the Green Challenge.

Pastbook: help users rediscover their memories online and offline (see our earlier coverage).

Wercker: a continuous deployment solution for software developers, hosted in the cloud.

Ideedock: a Q&A platform for employees in enterprises.

imgZine: a platform for publishing real-time social magazines on mobile devices.

Postcron: helps schedule a user’s Facebook and Twitter posts to maximize their social media presence.

Owlin: a real-time news analysis and intelligence tool for traders.

Nexi: aims to change the way companies attract and hire the most talented people.

Videoavatars: enables users to utilize online avatars to market and promote their brands.

Rockstart typicall invests roughly $20,000 in exchange for 8 percent equity in participating startups, also providing six months of free office space and the aforementioned three-week road trip to Silicon Valley.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Published
Back to top