 Thank you all and hello everyone and welcome to the slush 100 finals This is the pitching competition where 100 early-stage startups were selected to present their company That group was narrowed down to 20 semi-finalists who we all saw at the startup studio just yesterday And today the three finalists have the chance to win it all here on founder stage This competition embodies everything slush is all about helping early-stage startups on their journey ever since our first event 13 years ago this mission has inspired countless people to come to Helsinki and see what the latest success stories are and Learn how they can help the community. It is what? has driven 1,700 investors to come to the cold north and see what the next and most impactful Companies that they can work with are it is what has mobilized 1,100 volunteers here today to give their time to help the entrepreneurs to find what they need here It's their yes We can attitude that makes slush possible in the first place and as young people They will be the ones driving the change in the future and most importantly It's why 200 startup founders and operators have come here to build their teams and companies To take the leap on their journey in solving the most pressing issues in the world today a total of 8,800 people have come here today because the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and here at slush 2021 it is as strong as it has ever been This year is the 10th anniversary of slush 100 organized since 2011 The winner has always left with a package to help them keep building their company and benefit from the greatest minds that we have here This year the winners package is going pros of the following prizes We have up to $100,000 in AWS promotional credits as well as up to $10,000 in AWS business support credits tickets to slush 2022 and media investor visibility Along with an interview for slush media slush news One year of pitch pro for free and a swag pack for the winning team and last but not least Each of the jurors here today will give one hour of free mentoring time to the winning team Now you of course want to know who is on the jury this year then well sitting up here next to the stage We have principal at general catalyst Juliet Baylin Next we have founding partner at Maki VC Ilkakivi Mackey Our third judge is partner at cherry ventures Sophia Benz fourth judge on our panel is partner at EQT ventures Ted Persian and Finally, we have partner at yes VC Yuri Engestrem Thank you for being here jurors for helping make this competition possible today We'd also like to thank the slush 100 partners Amazon web services and pitch for their support in making the competition happen So the time has come are you ready to start the slush 100 finals? Good very good buzzing like a beehive in here So let's get started our first finalist is vitros go a company whose goal It is to find novel drug targets with just a laptop running mechanical biological experiments on demand Automatically here is their co-founder and CEO Karla Kriyesi to pitch Karla, please Absolute honor to stand up here. My name is Karla I'm CEO and co-founder of vitroscope. We enable lifelike biology experiments at scale Last year our test users have already found four potential new drug targets You can never discover on a traditional biology experiment this year They were not only able to confirm these results. They also did a bunch more, which is awesome And not only that we also ship the first batch of our products to our first paying customers including very prestigious ones like Harvard Medical School The fundamental problem that we are attacking is that when we develop medicine drugs We develop them for very active moving human beings We are very complex bundle of cells and all of these cells experience a lot of stimuli Including actually a lot of mechanical forces But when we develop drugs we develop them and test them in these plastic dishes Where there's none or almost none of these stimuli's and is therefore not such a Big surprise that over 90% of these drugs fail in the R&D pipeline and that creates a hundred billion dollar problem If you look at this process a bit more in detail, not only is the failure rate very high It's also extremely important to see that one third of the promising compounds actually fail in the very last stage In the most expensive stage where we test the drugs on human patients That's just not a monetary problem. It's also a health problem if you have a rare condition Maybe you're suffering from it There's a very small chance that you ever get a treatment because the risk of developing for these few patients It's just so so large and that brings me to our vision Our vision is to de-risk the drug R&D process. Our vision is your risk drug R&D We are already today helping our customers to make their initial experiments more lifelike more accurate They can simulate what will happen to the cells in the human patient We want to scale this so we can help the industry save billions in R&D costs Make their clinical trials more predictable and ultimately get more drugs out on the market to help more people our first product our first step towards that vision is Enabling the life observation of living cells in lifeline conditions So it's basically as if you were looking into the bloodstream of a human patient But in the safety of your laboratory We do this with a very nice piece of hardware. It's a compact platform That allows our users to do exactly that to look at cells in life in the life setting and see how they would react as if they were in the human patient and What sets us apart is that we're fully online So we create in our cloud a digital twin of what is going on on our device So that allows us to help our customers with software solutions so they can better prepare Run and also analyze their experiments And that's very nice because think of it this way We're selling our customers like a remote control a physical thing that they can use and they can try on and test on Until they find the one thing that is really well working and They use our cloud to capture and analyze this data all the way So we are in the loop so we can remotely start scaling their most promising protocols once they don't need 10 Data points, but once they need 10,000 right and the beauty is once you have this Cycle running. I don't need to explain this audience. I don't think the importance of Data and the power of accurate large amounts of data you can really start playing around with it and Who knows maybe in the future we're gonna become the most efficient biotech company in the world Well, still a long way until there, but we're working on it Who's we we that's my great friend and co-founder CTO software engineer Hakey Sherman from here from Helsinki originally It's our biologist Mandela. She's actually using our products in the laboratory today in part to better understand her own condition And me originally a biomedical engineer CEO and co-founder in addition We have a nice network of advisors that help us with any questions. We may have To push this efforts forward we're raising 750,000 euros right now So if this resonates with you if you want to hear more then please reach out you have the details just don't wait too long So thank you so much. Thank you for having me look forward to your questions Hi. Hey, wow. That was loud So the discovery engine What does it do it's it's it's an imaging solution. Is it like an optical image imaging solution or how does it work? You use the optical solution around it. So it's it's an integrated technology where we expose the cells to a flow-induced mechanical stress, so We levered certain physical Fluid dynamical effects so that we can very controlled and used forces on the cells and you can live look at that Gotcha. So so the discovery engine is is the machine that adds the sort of stress and then you use other Exist always existing optical solutions to that's that's correct Yeah, we actually work in our own optical solutions as well so we can even more integrate the whole systems, but That's a silly steps Hi, thank you for a great presentation. I'd love to hear more about your go-to market strategy and sort of who you're selling to in the end. Yeah, so the Pharmaceutical market is an extremely tricky conservative market so so pharmaceutical companies state themselves that you know 99% of their Research happens outside of them, so they just buy up technologies But where pharmaceutical development starts is in the universities It's a PhDs the the postdocs that spend their weekends in the lab So that's our initial customers. They are eager to try out new technologies And and you know find new results and they're the ones who develop find these new targets who find these new compounds Just then at some point get into the pharmaceutical cycle So that's one thing we do and that's what we focus on a lot right now What we also start to work on now to have some credibility that we can actually deliver something is we reach out to top 20 pharmaceutical companies where we're now also in discussions with where It's about the establishing workflows that fits into their long-term strategy about you know removing mice models from the pipeline For example, I'm so that's a much much longer sale cycle I would say but that just takes a lot of our knee efforts But we can luckily use our same established platform to help them in that so You talk about the importance of data and Obviously with any of any analytical platform the quality of the data is going to impact the results So in order to determine toxicity or you talk about the viability of any particular drug What data sources are using either within the pharma companies or elsewhere? Right, so we're not using external sources right now at all. No, so we we training our models on our own developed data like the one we generate so if you if you Look at cells in in like let's say for example brain cells in a static plastic dish you will get completely different results than on our device and Or let's take the example of the these drug candidates is actually related to a disease a kidney disease To the facts over 400 million in the world people in the world You will not find these results ever in any existing data set that you can have so Right now we're really building this we will have to see where we can actually tap into existing platforms But it's maybe a bit too early to go into the in depth in that one. Yeah How about how about the IP? I guess that in every experiment you you would be gaining a lot of knowledge to the platform But I think that then is the quarrel that who owns it. Do you already have a hunch how it goes? Yeah, absolutely. It's never ending discussion on that one There's there's multiple models, but I think what what is Fundamental importance is that if if I look at your cells That you do an experiment on without your research question. It's just images I don't know what you did why you did it and what are you looking for are you looking for more or less? I don't know but We can still capture for example cell death It's still a fact that the cells died and we can feed this into our models that is independent of Why did I and what compound you use to make them die? That is yours. That is now let's say a pharmaceutical context, but in a research context Research is a much more open to share Experiences data they want their publication, but the publication is well it's published And so there is much more freedom to capture a lot more data There's also the model of if I run an experiment for you and you ask for 20 different proteins to be analyzed Well, there's many more that we can analyze that we don't need to sell you but we can still do it and that data We can retain as well So there's there's many ways how we can find a way through this and I think the world is ready also the pharmaceutical word to more digitalized solutions in that sector And that is all the time we have for you. Thank you very much Carlo again for your pitch. Enjoy the evening. Thank you All right moving on to our next finalist. It is a company called Hormona Their home test helps women to test their home or hormones on a regular basis so they can be better aware of their health Let's welcome co-founder and COO Yasmin Tageson. Hi everyone. I'm Jasmine CEO and co-founder of Hormona We're empowering women to live better and healthier lives through taking control of our hormones with the help of AI and at-home testing Hormonal health sits at the very center of women's health and by 2025 Hormonal health could be a 50 billion dollar industry, but where are the unicorns? Today 80% of all women suffer from hormonal imbalances which in turn affect our cycles fertility and general well-being By controlling the most essential body functions our hormones play a key role in our overall health and affect us women on a Daily basis throughout life Our hormones are constantly changing and changing a lot, but who guides us through these massive hormonal changes Who tells us if a change is expected normal or abnormal today? No one But this is what we're on a mission to change Hormona was created to empower women to live happier and healthier lives in harmony with our hormones Our goal is to save millions of women the cost and pain of going through the same journey as our founder Carolina did and To develop an affordable way for women to track and understand her hormones to allow for easier Transitions through the various stages of a woman's life The first part of our end-to-end solution is our app which actually launched on the startup stage about an hour ago and The app allows women like myself to first of all get a better understanding of my hormones But it also allows me to track and monitor my hormonal symptoms Improve on said symptoms through 12 week action plans and engage with other women in our community Next up in the pipeline is our home hormone test Which is the first quantitative at home hormone test testing the most essential biomarkers Which we feel is a very natural next step complimenting our existing digital solution Our patent-pending test is very easy to use you simply take it in the morning Once a week and scan it with your mobile camera and by testing regularly We can help confirm if you are going into menopause We'll have problems getting pregnant or pick up any hormonal changes that may impact your life The company is a result of my co-founder and our CEO Carolina's personal struggle with health and well-being I Joined the team because of our long-lasting friendship and previous startup history But we also have max our CTO with over 15 years experience in building technical solutions Adina our CPO specializing in growth and digital health products Our gynecologist Katerina who was the first chief medical officer for flow the period tracking up and our endocrinologist Dr. Rocio Salas-Wallin who is the ultimate hormone expert and Together we have every 25 years combined technical and medical experience The global women's health market is substantial and with hormonal health sitting at its center and with 80% of women affected The potential market is huge Whenever we tell people what we do they all ask how does this not already exist and we ask the same thing So if not now then when Data is so desperately needed to improve women's health as a prolonged gender data gap has meant that women's hormonal health Has more or less been ignored Hormonal health in itself is desperately underserved and by being first-movers in this space We have the opportunity to claim an entire market that is currently completely untapped We have the opportunity to contribute to narrowing the data gap in women's health and improve health outcomes for 50% of the world's population Every single woman will be affected by her hormones and it's time. We stop ignoring that Our business model is direct to consumer subscription and our prices are based on in-depth customer research and interviews But we also see a huge financial opportunity in working with clinics and digital health companies So how will we go to market? Firstly, we will utilize our existing community of over 11,000 women and continues organic growth But we're also partnering up with both insurance and telehealth companies to quickly reach as many women as possible We're right now in discussions with both a large telehealth company that sees over 1 million women a month and A large insurance company that has over 2 million female customers We're currently raising one and a half million pounds and we have a third of our round committed So if anyone thinks this sounds interesting, please confine me after this. I'd love to tell you more and Now feeling hormonal should be the start of a conversation not the end join us on our quest to change a future of women's health Thank you. Hi. Thank you so much for a great presentation. Love to see that you're building this I'm a big fan of what you're doing and I agree with you that it's a shame that nothing similar have been built before So talking about your journey and building this unicorn when you plan to sort of hire and attract top tier talent What are some of the thoughts you have on building culture and growing your organization? It's a very good question and I think Obviously everyone wants to build a great organization where people want to stay and work and have a great work life balance At the stage we're in right now. We're just working really hard on getting this product to as many women as we can But obviously hiring top talent is super important. And that's the best way for us to become The unicorn in hormonal health Hey, thanks for the great presentation. You're from yes Can you talk a little bit about the diagnostic test you're using and Accuracy specificities and sensitivity so on. Yeah, absolutely So the test in itself, I guess the easiest way to describe it is similar to a pregnancy test. It's a mid-flow urine test and The pros of it and what's unique with what we're doing is that we don't have a separate hardware. Your mobile is actually the lab So we've developed a software that reads the intensity of the test line that gives the quantitative test result So we've cut out the lab We've cut out the separate hardware and it's a simple at-home urine test and in terms of specificity and sensitivity They're all about positive, you know enough positive corrects and enough negatives correct But our test always has a positive test line because that's how we measure it Did that answer your question? Thanks, I guess what I'm getting at is is, you know, what exactly are you measuring? Oh? We're measuring estrogen progesterone and FSH. We show the three main hormones to understand the women's hormonal health Cool. Thanks You talk about the the enormous stated gap in women's health, which I think is indisputable at this point And yet you also talk about helping women figure out what's normal or abnormal for them or expected However, there's a tension there if we don't have enough data about women It's difficult to understand what normal is. How do you think about that problem? No, of course And I think part of what we want to do is obviously help narrow that gap So there isn't as much of a discrepancy but With our test a woman has to test for a minimum of three cycles that way we establish what your normal is and Hopefully with that we can then understand what the greater normal is because maybe we don't even know what the right normal is at the moment How often do women measure? Is it daily once a week? It's it's four times a cycle so roughly once a week. It's the easiest way to describe it So it's still very user-friendly. It's not something you have to do every single day But we can still give you enough insights and predictions so that you know what's going on in your body at any one time And how you can optimize your life around that Now more questions Thank you All right. Thank you very much Jasmine Our third and final finalist is helpe They have redesigned elder care so that customers receive a single point of contact for all services and guidance and a platform to reach any Healthcare professional they might require Welcome to the stage helpe founder and CEO Richard Nordsten I'm Richard and I'm from helpe and at helpe we care about elderly Elderly care is under pressure in Europe and the symptoms are showing Soon we have nurse shortage of seven million and family members are spending 33 billion hours annually Helping their loved ones as the system is broken How did we end up here? Well, first it was easy. We had few seniors and we had the means to use expensive care homes Then came the push to a more affordable home care just to realize that just that that isn't enough The problem is that the traditional elderly care system and the model isn't scalable And why is that? well There's a limited innovation in this field and there's also in the traditional care model There's very few economies of scale and this leads to a very fragmented market of small players And just in Germany in Berlin you have 496 care providers and The problem from the user experience point of view if your family member is that Typically now in today's care. You need to visit your loved one before and after work Because your nurse is always changing and reporting is a black box Then during the work day you need to coordinate most of the services and they come as they come from different providers and Then at evenings you need to sort out a lot of the paperwork as you're no care professional and there's really no one who you can call I Was in this situation a few years ago when I was working at BCG and as most of you in the audience I also thought that when I get old the system will take care of it me But I was wrong At help we were doing two things The first thing is that we're creating a user experience as a family member would want it and The second part is we're bringing a scalable model to elderly care How are we doing this? Well, we're bringing a single point of contact for all services and guidance We're offering peace of mind at your fingertips so you can always know that your parent is okay And we're bringing a tech-enabled platform model that allows us to cut travel and bill ability waste we can automate coordination and Recruiting we can enable self-management on the field and create a good experience overall and this allows us to pay higher salaries to nurses We have a great team with complementary skill sets And we're backed by three investors believe in our mission and who have built similar unicorn unicorns a similar field and We have great product market fit with almost hundred percent customer retention and As many services have moved online during recent years and become tech-enabled first home delivery Then healthcare was digitalized. We're seeing that care is now being tech-enabled as well We come from Finland one of the most advanced hoker markets in the world and we're launching to Europe in January So to all you in the audience who are balancing work your own family and caring for an aging parent You are no longer alone Visit us at help it at com or help it at fi and test our family portal at app.help.com Thank you Great stuff. I loved how you skipped Sweden on your way out to to Europe there Well, Finn's typically go to Sweden first, but maybe we're different Could you talk a bit more about who you sell to and how that would work? Yeah So we have both private pay customers and then public pay So we tap into both sources I think most of most when you when you start up like us and you want to scale fast You typically tap into the private pay side first, which is very much customer-driven where you can innovate fully And you don't have a like public pay rulebook that that sets the way you innovate But then you can absolutely as we've done tap into public pay further on Got it and in terms of services you had a slide there with video conferencing that you skipped over Pretty quickly. Is that one of the pieces of your offering? Yeah So what we do is we do visits as a platform model peer-to-peer very much And then we bring a lot of we do remote visits and then monitoring as well as soon as well Thank you Which parts are you doing yourself? Are you are you doing also to visit? So are you leaving those to the third parties? Maybe which part like the visits and yeah, so we do it We have a platform model We have we have hundreds of nurses physiotherapists podiatrist home doctors and also some are part of it Some are produced by companies say like a cleaning company. So we are partnerships with them So we orchestrate everything vet every professional that they're high quality and we check them So obviously there's a lot you can do remote with technology when it comes to understanding a person's health Would you mind explaining a bit more your the tech part in your offering? So how much information about the patients do you gather and what sort of data points do you? You know cover yeah, absolutely, and then those are super important things like that's what we really want to be So one part is that we have this family portal where you can sort out everything from putting that putting the home in place And paperwork and rule books and everything so that's one one thing and then we have a customer facing for the family members also for the client side We have one user interface for them So they can know who is going there what they what they're doing and so on so you get it for full transparency on that and then We have up for the helpers as well everyone who's delivering that so those three elements are really really crucial for a great all-round user experience I Know you skipped Sweden and we can talk about that perhaps offline But for any country where you're going to launch can you talk a bit about your strategy for how you get started? Yeah, so Europe has multiple different types of countries and setups there, so We've categorized them into four different Different types and of course it's most easy to go in there where you can do private pay Fully and get the foothold quickly and then you can ramp up public pay whether it's Municipality-based or if it's insurance-based and where the taxation goes in so you both those markets And in terms of the service provider piece since you are working with partners Can you talk a bit about that as well? Not just who's gonna pay, but who's gonna actually be on the other side? Yeah, so we have both private practitioners like and then we have companies So it's a so we bring both of those into the platform to help and also a lot of that the IOT part So we integrate all we provide for us We provide safety safety bracelets and and stuff like that also So being really the ones who integrate the offline and online part there And it's important to to bring all those together And I think there's we have a big role there because there's so many IOT providers So many content providers for elder care so many IOT providers Someone needs to go through them and check which are the best ones and how to integrate them because as a family member You can't just know which one of the ten sensors you should choose. Thanks. That's informative How much does it cost? Yeah, so for us, we're praying it's hourly based depending on the service, of course And in most countries like in Finland you have like tax subsidy subsidies You have something from pensions and you might even have service vouchers Or if you're in an insurance company insurance based country like Germany you have in kind benefits So after those it's typically around 10 to 20 euros per hour that you're spending And that's the same like if you if you go to most of the markets like Finland or others You always have a self-paying component even if you take it in kind There's some part you need to pay as a family member and that's typically around 10 to 20 euros per hour per care That's awesome. I don't think we have any more questions Thanks very much. Thank you Thank You Richard and that is a wrap for the final pitches. Let's have one more round of applause for all of our finalists right here