The Industrial IoT Provider Develiot Is 2019’s Betapitch Sofia Winner
Winning startup competitions is like a second nature to Develiot these days. On Friday night, a jury consisting of Tatyana Mitkova, co-founder and CEO at ClaimCompass; Vladimir Rusev, regional manager at Leanplum; and Nikola Stojanow, co-founder at Aeternity, selected the Bulgarian industrial IoT company out of ten participants as the champion of Betapitch Sofia. With this victory in the bag, Develiot will have the opportunity to go to the global finals in Berlin and compete for 6 months of free betahaus membership, €5k, and a trip to Silicon Valley.
The 8th edition of Betapitch Sofia also saw the return of two former contest winners – Spas Kerimov from Printivo and Miroslav Miroslavov from OfficeRnD delivered keynote speeches and told the audience about their significant progress since the times they pitched on the Betapitch stage.
Develiot: traction, scalability, and social impact.
For those who still have not heard the name, Develiot develops hardware sensing systems that help city officials make data-driven decisions. It’s interesting, though, that while municipalities are one of the main users of Develiot’s solutions, the 11-month-old startup has chosen not to sell directly to them but to scale much faster through telecommunication providers and IoT systems integrators. As of today, a total of 33 air quality monitoring stations have been installed in Sofia and Ohrid, and telcos like Telelink, Vivacom, and A1 have joined Develiot’s partnership network. Considering the big acknowledgment from Microsoft back in June and the more recent win at CESAwards 2019, Develiot’s team has all reasons to be optimistic about the future of its business.
Rising Stars
A number of relatively unknown before Betapitch startups got a positive reception and showed that we might hear their names a bit more often in the months to come. Ampeco, a company whose SaaS platforms enable EV charging and shared mobility operators to quickly develop their businesses, Cowork 7/24, a provider of flexible and affordable access to coworking spaces, and Sheetly, a solution to help web merchants with product data management, all demonstrated a great deal of initial customer interest and balanced experienced teams.
