X-Europe fourth cohort is well on its way and we are thrilled to share statistics behind the startups that will introduce new sustainable practices and technologies to make our cities smarter.
The fourth X-Europe open call for startups and scaleups closed on the 31st March 2021, with 119 applications. As with cohort 2 and 3, X-Europe has chosen 27 most promising to join our third cohort - Smart Cities and Sustainability.
Our sustainability innovators will embark on an engaging programme, filled with demanding yet thrilling activities, webinars, events, mentorships sessions over the 5 month period, that we cannot wait to see how they will bask in the tales of triumph.
Company and Product Stage
As with all the open calls X-Europe has run, we had a difficult time selecting the most promising ones that will have the opportunity to excel in the programme. This time around we’ve seen the greatest competition among the early stage startups.
In the fourth open call, we’ve seen greater innovativeness and competitiveness coming from more developed startups, especially since we had only 5 spots dedicated for this maturity stage. On the other hand, we had seen promising startups in the growing and scaling stage (live funding & product market fit, and scaling), resulting in 9 and 13 startups being accepted from the respective stages.
Unlike our precious cohorts, we have a greater distribution of startups when it comes to the founding year, however, the majority of those (59%) come from 2018 and 2019.
Following a similar trend from the first three X-Europe cohorts, the most popular business model among our Cohort 4 selected startups is the B2B Model (52%), while this time around we seen an increase in those startups operating under the B2G (25%), B2C (14.5%), and B2C2B (8.5%) follow behind.
Home sweet home: the location of our startups & scaleups
While focusing on providing services that support internationalization to specific regions (Visegrad 4, the Baltics, and Benelux), X-Europe is a pan-European growth programme that welcomes startups and scaleups from all European Union (EU) and H2020 associated countries. The programme enjoys a high degree of geographical diversity when it comes to its participants. In total, the 27 participating companies come from 15 different countries (7 being from our specific regions), ensuring X-Europe’s wide impact.
The company focus and requested services
Cohort 4 shares interest in Smart Cities and Sustainability technologies, however, we are also seeing a dominant presence of our startups with technologies in Software, IoT, Smart Cities, Energy & Clean Tech.
To conclude, let’s take a look into the X-Europe services requested by our startups and scaleups. Yet again, the top four selected services were matchmaking with investors, matchmaking with corporations, one-on-one mentoring, and access to talent. Other services that were chosen and will be delivered by the X-Europe programme were growth hacking training, incubation (at TNW Amsterdam or TechChill Riga), TNW conference attendance and the pitch competition, acceleration. The partners’ network and expertise will enable X-Europe to provide the spotlight for our startups as well as facilitate the right connections that will foster their future growth.
Take a look at the Smart Cities & Sustainability portfolio to learn more about the solutions being developed.
Heads up!
Open Call 5 for Aerospace & Spacetech is closing on the 30th of June and we are inviting all startups operating with these technologies to seize this opportunity!
X-Europe will also have a final open call focused on FinTech (Expected to start in mid-July 2021).
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