Having accelerated 200 startups who’ve raised €64,693,647 between them, Startupbootcamp know a thing or two about sniffing out killer startups. For their IoT & Data Accelerator, they received 250 applications, and heard 150 pitches across 12 days, from just 10 were selected. We had a chance to speak to five of the promising companies, and get a better idea of how they’re each trying to overhaul the IoT and data spaces. These five startups are certainly worth keeping an eye on in the months- and years- to come.
Zolertia
by Marc Fàbregas, CEO
The product: Zolertia offers to the market a new and innovative communication hardware to connect anything to Internet in a very simple and energy efficient way, to make real those tens of billions of products that are forecasted to be connected to Internet in 2020.
The business problem: Our products will enable lots of IoT products not feasible so far, thanks to the ultra-low power consumption and the long communication range it has. Furthermore, the available tools and the reliability and robustness of our products will make possible to develop those products and put them into the market in the shortest time ever got.
The most exciting moment so far: We have already sold almost 5000 units of our first product of this family of solutions in 35 countries worldwide. And now we are ready to raise funds to launch in July 2015 the second solution with significant improvements in the technology and new tools to let our customers and our community of users to start creating the future Internet of Everything.
Teraki
by Daniel Richart, Co-founder
The product: Teraki is a game changer in the Internet of Things: We provide a technology that reduces the volume of data that will flood our digital networks. Think of the new products and services which have been enabled in the recent past by the MP3 compression technology in the field of audio.
The business problem: Today, many potential IoT applications are not possible because of restrictions of existing networks’ ability to cope with the expected data volume, high costs associated with transmission over wireless and mobile networks and limitations in storage capacity. Teraki is lowering these barriers to a level that makes many more IoT applications affordable and profitable.
The most exciting moment so far: For us it was an especially encouraging and exciting moment when we got the opportunity to participate at StartupBootcamp in Barcelona. Through this program we already found a great
selection of mentors who strongly support us, and the keen interest of customers is incredibly motivating. With their help we will extract the full potential of the Internet of Things.
eNovalys
by Frank Hoonakker, President
The product: eNovalys propose a suite of tools to manage, share, and exploit the scientific raw data, starting with the chemistry. eNovalys has the capacity to exploit all the data including both success and failures.
The business problem: Today in the word 97% of the scientific knowledge is completely lost because it’s never published. Then the scientist repeat constantly the same experiences and the same failure all around the world, losing time and money. The eNovalys’ solution is to give access to these data and then completely change the paradigm of sharing science, by enabling the common knowledge and make the scientist more efficient.
The most exciting moment so far: Our biggest achievement has to be able to build our first community of 1500 users including a Nobel price of chemistry (Jean-Marie Lehn) and make some of them start to share their knowledge.
Datumize 
by Nacho Lafuente, CEO
The product: Datumize is the Smart Data Discovery company. We help companies to increase their revenue and decrease costs. Datumize achieves that through an unique technology that is able to discover business value out of unexplored data. We’ve created an amazing software technology – Datumize Data Collector. This product is able to connect into an internal communication network and capture data in real time.
The business problem: America had always been there for ages. However, someone had to discover it and announce the discovery to the rest of the world. Companies nowadays are like America. Companies have tons of relevant business data that are not being used, and these data need to be discovered. Customers at every industry are struggling to improve their business, and Datumize can really help to make actionable decisions that improve their business. And we’re doing so based on their existing data that are not being profited right now.
The most exciting moment so far: The first time we sold our technology. The vision was sketched on a piece of paper, this innovative customer trusted us… and we made it real. It was the kick-off of this amazing journey.
Plytix 
by Morten Poulsen, CEO
The product: Plytix is an online Digital Asset Management that enables brands to store, organize and share their product images. When shared with them, E-tailers will be able to access the images from their CMS and serve them directly on their sites and thereby save them time and money on photoshoot and manual upload.
The business problem: Plytix is solving problems on both sides of the value chain. Currently, brands are unable to get product based analytics data from 3rd party websites that are selling their products, and there’s no uniform way to share product information between brands and retailers. On the other side of the chain, webshops are spending up to 100$ on photoshoots per product – this cost will be completely eliminated with Plytix. Creating one new product in a webshop also takes around 23 minutes- a time we can slash by 80%.
The most exciting moment so far: Since we are still a new company that is still in the development phase, we have very little traction to show. Therefore our biggest achievement so far is to be elected to join the Startupbootcamp IoT&Data accelerator program.
(Image credit: Startupbootcamp)
