The MCEI team looks back on an exciting year as 2018 ends. Numerous startups, enthusiastic entrepreneurs, inspiring success stories and our own development within the MCEI team - all marks this amazing year as it goes by. The year also featured plenty of high energy startup and networking events organized by MCEI to foster the entrepreneurial culture at the University of Mannheim as well as at the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan region. We had amazing participation from students enthusiastic about startups, potential entrepreneurs, investors, and members and experts connected to the entrepreneurial scene in Germany and beyond. In this report we mostly focus on the second half of the year. If your interested in the first half please see our mid-year report.
Education and Support
Our accelerator style courses countinued on to another successful semester. We offered our MAN 631 Creativity and Entrepreneruship with four great student teams. They were developing four different startup ideas from scratch and by the end of the semester the were ready to take on seed investment to continue on. The startups were AskRobbie, makeZmecom, MaRoom, and TravelU. In the final pitch battle for this course, makeZmecom was deemed the winner as the most promising startup from the course by our external jury.
In MAN 633 we had four student startups advancing thier businesses. GoodCha, Hearma, Laptop Lockware, and Voltgear. All startups performed a major leap throughout the semester and are ready now for the next step. You all might have seen them in the pitch battle in our last Startup Lounge of the semester. In the Inside the Venture track of MAN 633 we had six student teams helping startups from the ecosystem with project work. AUCTEQ, Evid.One, Leafsystems, LU, Roadads, and Studybees were offering on-hand startup projects and received help by our student teams. The individual project reports can be found on our Inside the Venture pages.
Moreover, we also held MAN 630 Introduction to Entrepreneruship and MAN 635 Social Entrepreneurship as our more theoretical courses. The student teams have also been working on great case study presentations and social business models. In our Inside the Venture scheme we also had several Master's Theses beeing conducted with startups.
Inspiring Events
This semester we contined our Startup Lounge and Founder Talk series. At our Founder Talk this semester we gained deep insights into scaling a B2B tech venture with our alumni Philipp Ortwein. He reflected on his own expereience as a co-founder of InstaFreight and told us about his lessons learned over the past years. InstaFreightInstaFreight is the leading digital logistics provider for road freight in Europe - a 250 bn € market. The company consolidates the transport capacity of a highly fragmented supply base and offers it to shippers in one digital interface. With InstaFreight's digital platform, shippers and carriers realize efficiency potentials in the logistics process as well as cost savings through state-of-the-art technology. Philipp Ortwein is Co-Founder and Managing Director of InstaFreight, the digital forwarding company. He graduated with a Master in Management from the University of Mannheim and did his executive education in Harvard and Stanford. During 8 years of work experience at Bain & Company and 2 Startups, he gained expertise in digitization and Industry 4.0.
Our first guest this semester at our Startup Lounge was covexo. covexo shifts the development of software from the local computer to the cloud. Next we welcomed Treye Tech, an IT start-up company that develops user-oriented solutions for hand-free speechless interaction. For our first event in October we welcomed Niklas Schäfer from Laptop LockWare, one of our very own student founders. Following we had our next Startup Lounge with PMH, radically simplifying mass customization by empowering the use of large tables. After that we welcomed another one of our Student Founders with Pacific Straws. Glass straws made in Germany. The last startup of the semester was 100 Worte, coming to us for the penultime Lounge of the year. As usual, we reserved the last Lounge for our Pitch Battle, where our student startups from MAN 633 Entreprenerial Spirit pitched their semester's progress.
Happy Holidays and a happy new year!
Thank you all for an amazing year and see you all again in 2019!
