Monday, March 24, 2025

The top 20 startups of Slush 100

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Slush 100 — the most coveted startup competition in the world.

Eligibility criteria: Startups from Europe and North America, founded in 2020 or later, with less than €750,000 in equity funding.

The winner of Slush 100 will get an equity investment from the leading early-stage funds in Europe: Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, and Northzone.

These iconic funds have backed historic companies like Meta, Stripe, Airbnb, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Salesforce, Instacart, and Klarna.

The startups accepted into the top 20 will be getting hands-on sparring sessions with company founders and mentoring from experts from the startup ecosystem. This includes, for example, a pitch deck workshop from Harry Stebbings of 20VC.

The judges are:

  • Luca Bocchio, Partner at Accel
  • Juliet Bailin, Partner at General Catalyst
  • Paul Murphy, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
  • Philip Chopin, Partner at NEA
  • Wendy Xiao, Partner at NorthZone

The Shortlist Top 20 of Slush 100

🇪🇪 Align – customer intelligence for B2B product teams.

It integrates with all relevant data sources (CRM, Support, Slack etc), automatically detects and categorises insights from customer interactions and makes them queryable for the product team. This way client can test & validate hypotheses quicker, find hidden product growth opportunities and prioritise confidently.

🇨🇦 Alter Climate – a systemic climate intelligence to de-risk the impacts of climate change on real assets and improve financial performance.

It delivers systemic climate data at various levels, enabling climate-adjusted valuations, stranded asset risk management, and climate value-at-risk reports. The software also facilitates climate opportunities discovery and enhances potential to attract new capital. Alter combines cutting-edge technology and robust data intelligence to empower clients to navigate and capitalize on the climate landscape.

  • Climate, B2E (business to employee)
  • Current markets: UK & Ireland, North America
  • Future market focus: Nordics, UK & Ireland, DACH, France & Benelux, Southern Europe, North America, Middle East
  • Co-founders: Cedric B. Robert (CEO), Kevin Gentil-Cantin (CTO), Daria Hobeika (Policies), François Senez (Finance).

🇩🇪 amberSearch offers a multimedia enterprise search that makes the knowledge contained within pictures, videos, text or audio files available to every employee to work based on that knowledge rather than recreating knowledge.

🇫🇮 Ample acts as the bridge builder between citizens and the science community.

Ample is building an innovative global media platform that puts scientific expertise as the focal point of communication.

  • Media, B2B, B2C
  • Current markets: Nordics
  • Future market focus: Nordics, DACH, Southern Europe, North America, CEE, France & Benelux, UK & Ireland
  • Co-founders: Sampsa Aerikkala (CEO), Aleksi Nurmi (COO).

🇺🇸 Monadd – a home bill management software company that empowers people to take charge of their home bills and subscriptions.

  • Fintech & Insurance Tech, B2B, B2C
  • Current markets: North America, UK & Ireland
  • Future market focus: Oceania, France & Benelux, Nordics
  • Team description:

    Jessica Mendozza (CEO) has an extensive background in data management and marketing operations. She led and localised the project to build The Associated Press’ website, which grew revenue in the first year since its relaunch to $1.5 million, a 646% change in revenue directly from the site.
    Ali: Part of a startup that sold to Wealthsimple. He has a strong background in Fintech, front-tech development, and architecture.
    Ricardo Santos (CTO) developed NLP chatbots and architecture that has transferred tens of thousands of data points between telcos.

🇩🇪 Gaia – an all-in-one legal platform for small and medium-sized enterprises enabling them to control their legal management and deal cost-efficiently and timely with all their legal needs.

  • Legal Tech, B2B
  • Current markets: DACH
  • Future market focus: Nordics, UK & Ireland, France & Benelux, Southern Europe, DACH
  • Co-founders:
    Janina Möllmann (CEO) is a lawyer with 7+ years of experience in VC and as an in-house lawyer. She co-founded a law firm and scaled the team from 5 to 30 people in 2 years. From this, she has a great network of early adopters for the product.
    Ben Kubota (CTO/CPO) is a serial entrepreneur with 2 exits who has built software for over 15 years. Together they create a team of 8 employees who make the product and company together.

🇳🇱 Sovn – AI-powered hearables for chronic sleep disruption, starting with teeth grinding & clenching.

  • Health & Wellbeing, B2B, B2C
  • Current markets: UK & Ireland, North America, France & Benelux
  • Future market focus: Nordics, DACH, Southern Europe, North America, UK & Ireland, France & Benelux, Eastern Asia, CEE, Oceania
  • Co-founders: Selina Tirtajana (CEO), Gabriel Sáenz (Product & Product Lead).

🇪🇪 Lifeyear – a digital clinic tackling the unmet medical need for personalised cardiovascular care at scale.

By integrating clinical guidelines, remote patient monitoring, behavioural science, real-time data and AI, we provide patients and clinicians the tools they need to actively monitor, control, and reverse cardiovascular risk conditions, such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes and obesity.

  • Medtech & Pharma, B2B, B2G
  • Current markets: CEE, UK & Ireland
  • Future market focus: Nordics, UK & Ireland, Middle East, North America
  • Team description: Siim Saare (CEO), Kerli Kustola (Head of Product), Timo Mitt (CTO), Priit Palta (Chief Scientific Officer).

🇮🇪 Lua Health leverages advanced AI to empower organizations and their employees to proactively identify and manage real-time well-being-related issues.

Lua Health software can integrate with common enterprise platforms like MS Teams, Slack and G-chat. It pulls text data from these platforms and uses its clinically designed algorithms to detect downward trends in real time. Once it detects an issue, its chatbot reaches out privately to an employee and offers them recommendations to support that might benefit them.

  • Enterprise Software, B2B
  • Current markets: North America, South America, South East Asia, UK & Ireland
  • Future market focus: Nordics, North America, Western Asia, Middle East, UK & Ireland, Central America, Eastern Asia, Central Asia, DACH, Southern Europe, South America, Oceania
  • Co-founders: Fionn Delahunty (CEO), Mihael Arcan.

🇬🇧 XWorks – a data integration platform that disrupts how waste and secondary raw commodities are traded, tracked and analysed.

The platform is an accredited network for waste professionals, ensuring all connections are verified and certified. It provides end-to-end tracking through the entire value chain, from waste generation to recycling, with digital product passports that comply with the latest regulations.

🇫🇮 BoxBox is the Airbnb of self-storage, it helps people make money by storing stuff for others.

  • Real Estate, B2C, C2C
  • Current markets: Nordics, CEE
  • Future market focus: UK & Ireland, France & Benelux, Southern Europe, DACH, CEE, Nordics
  • Co-founders: Markus Evardson has 7 years of industry knowledge. Maarja Vilo with the ability to take care of every little detail. Kevin Kaldalu is responsible for the expansion of BoxBox.

🇬🇧 Broadn enables business people to delegate work to AI assistants through email effectively.

  • Enterprise Software, B2B, B2C
  • Current markets:, UK & Ireland, North America
  • Future market focus: Nordics, UK & Ireland, DACH, France & Benelux, Southern Europe, North America, Oceania
  • Co-founders:
    (CEO) Calin Drimbau’s background is in product and AI, having built an NLP product used by 50 Global 500 companies and scaled it from zero to $4m ARR in 2 years.
    (CTO) Victor Paraschiv has a Master’s degree in ML from UCL and trained the first LLMs on legal documents in 2018. Together, we incubated nakhoda, Linklaters’ tech spin-off, and took it from zero to £90m valuation, with a team of 30 and 130 Tier 1 banks as clients.

🇩🇪 Clypp – the easiest way to share your knowledge by making it super simple to create & share visual workflow tutorials right in your browser.

The tutorial created is captioned automatically through AI and summarized into the most important points. Clypp integrates with all the tools used in daily work, such as MS Teams or Atlassian Confluence.

  • Enterprise Software, B2B
  • Current markets: DACH
  • Future market focus: DACH, UK & Ireland, Nordics, France & Benelux, Southern Europe
  • Co-founders: Maximilian Zeyda (founder & sales), Edwin Sauer (founder & product).

🇩🇪 ColorTones films musical instruments and uses augmented reality to revolutionize digital music education.

The unique approach involves filming musical instruments to offer real-time guidance on techniques like piano, guitar, and ukulele fingering. This method is more than just listening—it’s about visually engaging with music through augmented reality effects.

  • Music, Arts & Entertainment, B2C
  • Current markets: DACH
  • Future market focus: DACH, Southern Europe, North America
  • Team description:

    Henrik Schiller, 24, is ColorTones’ technical cornerstone. With a Master’s in Physics achieved at 22 and a start in Geophysics studies at 15, he brings unparalleled technical prowess to the team. His previous work includes integrating AI into particle accelerators, and he adds creative flair as a skilled pianist and ukulele player.

    Sebastian Krumm, 26, directs the business and management facets of ColorTones. Numerous practical internships shaped his expertise in organization and communication. Beyond his business acumen, he is a gifted musician, adept at guitar, ukulele, and vocals.

🇸🇪 Silo Team – a developer onboarding, offboarding, and retention platform.

  • Enterprise Software, B2B
  • Current markets: Europe, APAC and North America.
  • Future market focus: North America, Eastern Asia, South East Asia, Oceania
  • Team description: Rasmus Stjernström, Ida Stjernström (CCO).

🇩🇪 Congrify supports merchants and payment service providers in managing, unifying and building payment data intelligence to improve operational processes and performances, reduce costs and automate repetitive manual tasks.

  • Analytics, B2B
  • Current and future focus markets: DACH, Nordics, UK & Ireland, France & Benelux, North America, Southern Europe, France & Benelux, CEE
  • Team description:

    Marco Conte is the Founder & CEO, based in Munich; he has spent the last 10 years working for companies such as Western Union, Wirecard, Nets, Riverty, Grover and many others as Pre-Sales, Product and Advisor.

    Alex Timoshenko (co-founder & CTO) has more than 20 years of experience in software and data engineering; he built his first e-commerce at the age of 15, in 1998. He has spent the last decade working in Booking.com, where he made the payment acceptance infrastructure from scratch.

    Alex Durkov is joining as COO. He has a decade of operational payments and risk management experience and has spent the last two years working as COO for a London-based fintech startup.

🇳🇴 ekvi – an app that helps women with endometriosis track, understand, and share their symptoms with doctors.

  • Health & Wellbeing, B2B, B2C
  • Current markets: Nordics
  • Future market focus: Nordics, Middle East
  • Co-founders:

    Cathrine Delp (CEO) excels in product and business development and human-centred design, with a track record in the financial industry.

    Mubeen Shahid (CPO) leverages 17 years of technical and entrepreneurial expertise and can steer enterprise-level and startup product development.

🇬🇧 Factored empowers landlords to access capital from their future rental income, allowing them to effectively meet their needs, significantly enhancing tenant living standards, and drastically reducing carbon emissions from their rental properties.

  • Fintech & Insurance Tech, B2B, B2C
  • Current markets: UK & Ireland
  • Future market focus: DACH
  • Co-founders:

    Ben Schuldenfrei, CEO, 10 years of Fintech experience as a former management consultant at Accenture and EY and a startup operator at Lendingblock, a consumer lending and borrowing platform with 10K MAU.

    David Rabee, 10 years of Proptech experience as former marketing director at Yahoo and Matterport, scaling a team from 4 to 120, revenue from $0 to $30M ARR and supporting a listing on the NASDAQ.

🇩🇪 Faircado enables the switch to a circular economy by turning second-hand into every consumer’s first choice – with an AI-powered sustainable shopping assistant that automatically finds the best second-hand alternatives to what users are looking for online.

The plugin detects when a user shops online and automatically pops up with the best, cheapest and most sustainable alternatives for the product they are looking for.

By facilitating the reuse of existing products instead of encouraging new production, Faircado makes every consumer save time, money and CO2.

  • Climate, B2C, B2B
  • Current markets: DACH
  • Future market focus: DACH, Nordics, UK & Ireland, France & Benelux, North America, Southern Europe
  • Co-founders: Evolena de Wilde d’Estmael (CEO), Oliver Hale (COO).

    Evolena is also a climate activist and co-founded the non-profit Solidartsy, aiming at bridging the gender gap in the world of art. In 2022, she was named Top 100 Women in Social Enterprise, Entrepreneur of the Day on IWD by Handelsblatt (Germany’s The Economist), and European Climate Pact Ambassador by the European Commission.

🇳🇱 Shai – pre-production for commercials and films with generative AI.

  • Media, B2B
  • Current markets: France & Benelux
  • Future market focus: France & Benelux, North America, UK & Ireland, DACH
  • Team description: Leonardo Piumi (CEO), and Jeroen van Gorsel (CTO), Eduardo Wallace (Head of Creative).

    Leonardo has 8 years of experience in the creative industry as a Creative Producer & Leadership roles in various content teams and companies, ranging from tech startups in San Francisco to corporations like Philips.
    Jeroen has experience in developing software and Machine Learning systems in both the financial sector and for Physics Research collaborations. Lately, he has got addicted to generative AI.
    They recently onboarded Edu, one of the 200 photographers in the world, as Head of Creative AI.

Slush received 1118 applicants. The prize? A €1,000,000 investment from 5 top tier VCs.

On November 30th, the semifinals are unfolding on stage in Helsinki, with judges currently selecting the top 3 startups to present on the main stage at Slush in Helsinki on December 1st.