We warmly thank our judges Pia Santavirta from Finnish Venture Capital Association, Tom Henriksson from Open Ocean Partners Oy and Timo Tirkkonen from Inventure/Nordic Technology Fund for carrying out the difficult task of selecting the winners of the cash prizes. We also thank Ilona Mooney for organizing the special mentoring awards.

Winners

Zen Coffee (Aalto-Hanken)
Winner of the 1st prize (3000 Euros) and special mentoring award
Zen Coffee is the first coffee created specifically for people who experience negative side effects from caffeine. By combining the relaxing effects of tea with the high caffeine content of coffee we've created a product that gives you the best of both worlds: a high energy beverage without the negative side effects. The result is a better more relaxed and focused from of energy.
Team: Sam Thompson, Per Simberg, Jere Vitikka, and Aarre Tuokko
Contact: samuel.thompson(.)aalto.fi

DSM Bracelet (Aalto-Hanken)
Winner of the 2nd prize (1500 Euros) and special mentoring award
We at DSM Bracelet want to prevent the horrific amounts of sexual assaults and assaults that occur at music festivals. We want to do this with a bracelet that will be included in the ticket price for the festival attendees. The bracelet will have two primary functions: the first one will be a walletless payment system, that is intended to make buying/selling more effective and thus increase sales for the festivals. But our USP is an emergency function. The emergency function on the bracelet will enable people in dangerous situations to activate a distress signal that will immediately be relayed to security personnel. The security personnel will receive the exact location of the distress signal as well as a GPS guidance, from each individual guards mobile device to the person in need.
Team: Victor Lindahl, Sara Käld, Axel Helisten, and Mathias Granberg
Contact: victor.lindahl(.)hankenes.org

ZeroWaste (The Shortcut)
Winner of special mentoring award
The ZeroWaste app by WAAP will give you everyday advice about eco-living. If you follow these instructions you will get scores which you can exchange for a discount in our partners' shops and restaurants. Also, we will open an information website where you can get all info about eco places in Finland. The team has participated the Idea Development Weekend and has been spotted at the lab working on their project.
Team: Ekaterina Vladimirova, Majdouline El abdellaoui, and Mariana Poncio
Contact: iryna.bureika(.)gmail.com

FloweRescue (The Shortcut)
Honorable mention from the judges
FloweRescue unites flower lovers and middle age flowers to avoid them going to the bin. How does it work? Florists offer their not-so-fresh flowers on an online platform, they find and lighten a new home. This environmentally friendly idea won the first place on the Digital Prototyping Weekend due to its readiness and applicability.
Team: Kati Mayfield and Saravanan Duraisamy
Contact: kati.mayfield(.)gmail.com

Other teams in the order of pitching

RINKO (AVP)
RINKO and our project is about building bioclimatic greenhouses on the rooftops of Helsinki, to produce organic vegetables and provide Helsinki restaurants with a supply of healthy and local grown food.
Team: Vivien Lefranc, Vladimir Zieger, Reda Elwaradi, Yohann Sandoz, Nil Fontanals, and François-Xavier Lelong
Contact: nil.fontanals(.)aalto.fi

Costa Del Sol Properties (Haaga-Helia)
The channel number one for your dream home in Costa del Sol
Team: Edward Poolan
Contact: 3dwardpoolan(.)gmail.com

Super Sales (Aalto-Hanken)
Airports depend on sales to survive and flight delays are the way to do that. SuperSales uses IoT data such as flight schedules and inventory in order to predict airport businesses’ customer flows and future demand. SuperSales eliminates the uncertainty caused by delayed flights, enabling airport retail companies to benefit from increased sales, better-decision making, smarter time allocation, all the while being more sustainable.
Team: Roope Nykänen, Loi Tran, Verneri Autti, and Anna Hedvall
Contact: anna.hedvall(.)shs.fi

Beni (Aalto-Hanken)
We at Beni believe that everyone has the right to live a healthy and enjoyable life, regardless of age or physical condition. We are creating a device that’s easy-to-use and that helps elderly live an easier and more convenient everyday life. The device consists of a wearable wristband and tags that are attached to one’s valuables. We’re all about helping them save time and feel safe, so they can focus on doing the things they love.
Team: Emelie Norrgård, Julia Kyllönen, Wilma Westerholm, and Van-Nhi Nguyen
Contact: emelie.norrgard(.)student.hanken.fi

Verifione (AVP)
VerifiOne is a financial check service, which helps landlords verify payment capability of their potential tenants. We aim to bring private landlords more reliable information by finding financial problems before they can be seen in credit check. The service is safe and reliable to use without human interference in check-up process.
Team: Zulal Karaca, Uyen Lo, and Henri Korhonen
Contact: ayse.karaca(.)aalto.fi

PT Studio (Haaga-Helia)
Personal Training services with an individual diversified approach and training environment for a full focus on own goals for a better health, self-esteem and new horizons.
Contact: nina.merensky(.)myy.haaga-helia.fi

Lumo (The Shortcut)
Lumo is the ``digital friend`` of a child. Winner of the Idea Development Weekend, but the team already has the first version of the prototype and working on the second version.
Team: Tatu Luoto, Mikko Alho, Marika Vuorinen, Deepak Aggarwal, Tu Vu, and Volha Vurst.
Contact: tatu.luoto(.)gmail.com

SetUp (AVP)
To make remote work guilt-free, offer better focus and better communication with co-workers.
Team: Tommi, Bilen, Bas, and Linh
Contact: tommi.utriainen(.)aalto.fi

Homes in One System Oy (Haaga-Helia)
Homes in One System provides all participating agents/brokers a service that encourages a collaboration among each other to provide a better service for home sellers and buyers
Team: Marcel Angelosanto, Sofia Saarinen, Joseph Karanka, and Jordan Forbes
Contact: marcelnfli33(.)hotmail.com

Collage and painting are for Fabu Pires an ingenious looping mix-and-match of cutting, tearing, weaving and layering images from our contemporary hyper reshuffled streetwise culture. For Pires collage and collage paintings are the hybrid language of urbanity—remixed, re-contextualized, and wholly built from the fragments and samples of daily life.
Having experimented with several aesthetic languages, collage became a distinctly modern technique with which he could structure his subject matters. The collages allow him to play, to make spontaneous connections in a dream-like state, and somehow a divine intuitiveness to getting together countless characters, figures, cut-outs, patterns, silhouettes from vintage magazine, old biology books, posters, and ephemera.
Inside Pires artistic code, collage techniques emphasise modification and alteration; is an aesthetic of cojoining that permits to him both the production of a vivid flat surface -necessary nowadays if one's was to count as, or a least look contemporary- while at the same time enabling an evocative subject to be addressed.
Underlying Pires artworks might be observed a pretension and eagerness to raise intricate questions about diverse themes and topics; cultural hybridization philosophical notions of the unconsciousness, ufology phenomena, allusions and symbolisms of spiritual human evolution.
Pires emphasises the intrinsic, visceral and instinctive notion of creating art.
''Everything is intuitive of course, basically, intuitiveness might become experimental”. His art practice is a continuous summary of reinvented images. These images contain clues that allow us to synthesise, experimenting re-envisaging and finally been able to piece them back together again

If I had to choose one word to describe myself and my work it would be fearlessness. Being an artist requires the passion to inspire, creativity to experiment, vision to imagine, and the courage and compassion to empower others. The main obstacle people face when going after their dreams is fear – fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of criticism, fear of not being accepted. I have learned to overcome these obstacles and have since become an inspiration to others.

I believe that the art – as everything else in the society as well – is an inherently political space. Therefore I want to create art work to affect positive change in our society. The power of art as a way to concretize abstractions allows it to illuminate, reconstruct and reinvent our world.

Very often I find art as something very distant, cold and disengaging – my work is none of those. My endless interest in human beings, communities and transformation can be seen in my work. I always produce my art work together with people and communities with aesthetic interest and a critical eye on our social environment. I believe that change can happen when people are engaged and given the opportunity to experiences rather than keeping the audience in the distance.

For the past 10 years, I have empowered and challenged individuals, communities and organizations to unleash their potential and become more creative and courageous. In my projects, I combine my artistic talent, inspirational fearlessness, tools of facilitation and coaching and have empowered thousands of people around the world.

I have worked in collaboration with several international art and cultural entities such as:

Kompressor Sven Triloqvist is president of the ADS (Advanced Disinformation Systems) division of Bonk Industries, and a member of the Executive Board of the BBI Global Group. He is a European expert on criminal obfuscation, prevarication and deception. He was appointed general secretary of the International Solipsist Society in 2016.

Mikko Heikinpoika is a throat singer, multi-instrumentalist and a music producer from Finland. He is a part of the new wave of live musicians who by the means of live looping and vocal layering, merge organic and electronic music together and takes his audience on a wild ride of live energy.
His music could be called Global Bass with strong Nordic and Siberian vibes. Rooted, tribal rhythms and ancient vocal techniques with live electronics.

For his live performance at Startup Circus we will see him paired up with extraordinary live-dancers and visuals using Omnigeometry who are at the cutting edge of sacred geometry projections.

Alvar Gullichsen’s current series is directly concerned with transcultural visual pattern imagery. His advanced, highly personal explorations of this possibly universal geometric language, are closely related to his ongoing inquiries into shamanistic, transcendental experiences and traditions. Gullichsen – and others – see these rich geometries as mysterious pathways of knowledge and understanding shared by humans across diverse eras and cultures.

Sini Kunnas is an artist who has developed a distinct engagement in themes involving emotional ability to bounce back, intuitions and encouragement in creativity. She is an established artist whose powerful message of harnessing spiritual strength through the artistic process will be a core theme of her keynote at Startup Circus.

We have chosen Saara Vaniala because of her unique skill in creating spectacular pieces of fine art that are multilayered puzzles of spiritual information. Witnessed live her work is beyond belief. She is an established illustrator, fine-artist and singer who has created a bold aesthetic based on the concept of the female as the center of the universe.

Her intricate worlds are both ancient and futuristic lifting the delicate figures and elevating them into roles where goddesses playfully exchange glances with cosplay figures over the air of delicate nonchalans and flamboyancy. These women are alien and at the same time familiar, representing a mode of female liberation where the individual can shift to any reality they wish without losing a beat or cracking a nail. A quantum artist is a perfect way to describe her as she moves with grace into the near and distant future with her imagery. They are soft and inviting images with fierce self-respect and a perfect embodiment of the age of individualism at ease with itself.

This elegant artist, having chosen an extremely sincere path for her life and her work, strips her models and bares their soul, as they vibrate with unspoken emotion, longing for peace; at times with pleasure, at times with pain.

``Dragonfruit`` (2017-2019)