emaze’s PitchUp’15: Conversation with Anat Richter

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Anat Richter is Content Marketing Director at emaze. When she isn’t tapping away in its Tel Aviv offices, she is documenting life on the web as a user and a guest blogger.

In this conversation, Anat discusses emaze’s new PitchUp’15 challenge.

Geetesh: Tell us more about PitchUp’15 — what is this challenge about, what motivated you to create this platform. Also tell us more about the responses you have received so far.

Anat: The PitchUp’15 contest offers contestants the opportunity to present their pitches in presentation form using emaze.com and get it viewed by top tier members of the business community, VCs and potential investors. Prizes for the best pitches include a $10,000 cash prize and a sponsored slot at DEMO conference.

When we started PitchUp’15, we had in mind an exciting, sweeping, global contest for start-ups of all stages and hailing from all places with a cool prize at the end of it all. What we did not anticipate was the breadth and depth of valuable information that poured in, painting an intriguing picture of the global state of start-ups.

As a Tel Aviv-based start-up, emaze expected the majority of submissions to come from Israeli start-ups. But apparently, in the global marketplace, physical location and local fame play a very small role.

With more than 30% of submissions hailing from the Greater San Francisco area as compared with 14.3% from Tel-Aviv, it appears Silicon Valley maintains its title as the start-up capital of the world. But the flood of submissions from unexpected locations such as Cameroon suggest that tech activity is springing up across Africa too. 4.5% of submissions coming from Indonesia, 5.2% from the Philippines, and nearly 6% of all submissions coming from Singapore are teaching us that India, China and Japan are no longer the sole players in the Asian entrepreneurial scene.

Geetesh: Based on the responses so far, what trends do you see?

Anat: We see some really interesting trends. Where financial services were the hype of the start-up world a few years ago, it now seems that social and entertainment-based start-ups are dominating the industry.

Surprisingly, mobile and apps have also been on the decline, representing only 10.5% of all submissions. Neck-to-neck at just over 5% each were the healthcare and productivity start-ups, suggesting, on the one hand, a technological leap in costly biotech industry and, on the other, a stagnation in the productivity industry which blew up a few years ago and has since run out of ways to reinvent calendar add-ons, task-list apps and efficiency charts. Expectedly low at a mere 2.4% was the robotics industry. It seems it will take some time before this industry, with its long production times and high costs, will appeal to start-ups

Statistics on the funding stages of submitting start-ups offered an optimistic snapshot of the ratio between the bootstrap and seed stages. It seems that one in every five bootstrap start-ups has managed to raise seed money. While over 60% of the start-ups that received seed also raised Round A funding.

Categories: contest, design, interviews, presentation_skills