“Remember, the audience is on your side!” head of Helsinki Incubators Irina Blomqvist assures the Biosphere teams sitting at the edge of their seats, ready to pitch their solutions at the programme’s Demo Day. The third round of the University of Helsinki’s Biosphere incubator, after six months of harbouring the entrepreneurial growth of 13 innovative solutions, has come to the end of its course. But not without a celebration! Blomqvist urges our participants to give themselves a generous pat on the back: “This evening is for you guys, remember to enjoy it!”
The Kaivopiha HUONE event space, kindly sponsored by the programme’s collaborative partner Vaisala XWeather, turns into an arena of keen anticipation as each team takes the limelight in turn. Team Sustaff stresses the importance of making labs comprehensively safer and more sustainable, while OliOil pitches their autonomous tech solution for instant oil spill response. Kauno, on the other hand, gives a snippet of the superpower qualities of bilberry waste in making products for gut and skin health. These solutions, along with many others, are evaluated by a jury consisting of Sam Laakkonen, Mario Aguilera, and Pia Erkinheimo, and at the end of the night, one lucky team will take home the title of the Best Pitch. Who will it be?
As the jury deliberates, our teams can take a sigh of relief and lean back over some food, drinks, and mingling. We get a chance to pull participant Mohammad Imangholiloo aside for a chat. The PhD candidate from the University of Helsinki’s Department of Forest Sciences came to the programme to work on his MapSeedling solution, which leverages advanced technology to create precise assessments of young forests. The approach not only enhances the accuracy of forest inventories but also supports sustainable forest management and conservation efforts from the onset.
Imangholiloo shares that while he has worked on communicating his solution academically through writing his thesis, learning how to do so in an entrepreneurial context was a new and eye-opening challenge. “It was a valuable thing for me to get an idea of how to form my message in a commercial sense; how to communicate and pitch the idea as compared to how it’s done in the research world,” he reflects.
This sentiment is echoed by programme graduates Eliška Čejpová and Karina Ovanesian, who are behind the solution Kadeli, a HR support system designed to rid recruitment practices of biases and to offer a flexible and tailorable solution to companies seeking efficiency in their recruitment and onboarding strategies. They name the process of “getting comfortable with the uncomfortable” as one of the key takeaways of the programme.
“We trained a lot of stuff,” says Čejpová. “But it was all in a super supportive environment, there was no competing with one another.”
Ovanesian adds: “It was one of the best experiences of my life! I loved acquiring new knowledge and it was wonderful to meet so many interesting and proactive people. There was such an inspired atmosphere of creativity.”
The duo goes on to commend their fixed mentor Maria Jimena Vargas as well as rotating mentors Andreas Roos and Carmo Requejo: “I loved our mentors. It was great to be matched with people who fully got what we were going for and who shared our energy,” Čejpová beams, to which Ovanesian adds with tongue-in-cheek rivalry: “All mentors were great, but ours were the best. It was a Super Match!”
Speaking of mentors, they would hardly want to miss the teams’ big day, and indeed, many of them can be spotted here and there among the clusters of guests. This is the perfect opportunity to interview long-time mentors Sam Laakkonen and Martin Quach: what wisdom do they have to part about the third round of the programme?
“What I usually say is that programmes take about three years to develop and mature. I think you can definitely see that here now: there’s a good playbook to go by and things are running smoothly,” Laakkonen reflects.
Quach, on the other hand, has noticed a growing sense of commitment in the participants over the years. “Everyone is here because they want to make a difference in the world—and year after year, this becomes more and more clear. There’s an ecosystem, a culture evolving around this. All of this can be hard to evaluate as a singular incubator, it’s more like a movement,” he says and continues: “There’s something special in a programme being meant to bring about change in the world. At the heart of it all is a desire to make a difference, a selflessness. At a VC event in London, for example, there’d be a different vibe. It really is satisfying to be a part of this movement, of starting to do things a little bit different.”
Programme manager Pedro Gensini himself has been busy going around the room congratulating our dear graduates. To us he shares that this time around, the programme has been more personal and workshop-oriented, with a great focus on pitching. Gensini says that the teams have gone from struggling with describing their solutions to knowing how to communicate and tune their message to many different audiences.
“Besides that, all teams have displayed a level of maturity and experience in working life, which has reflected on the way they’ve presented their issues,” he says proudly. “They’ve identified genuine problems that they’ve faced in their careers themselves. The best part of my job is to work with people that are in love with the problem, not the solution. Because only that way can you bring about something actually meaningful.”
The prize of the Best Pitch is, after hard deliberation by the jury, finally granted to Mohammad Alzeer and Ahmad Alzaza behind team EcoGeo Materials, a novel carbon absorption solution that uses recycled and natural materials. As the November evening draws to its close, Irina Blomqvist’s opening words ring true: this has only been the start of our Biosphere teams’ journeys. Although no end of any programme comes without its melancholy, the good news is that there’ll be many more happy triumphs to celebrate and countless more memories to be made. “Bittersweet” is how Eliška Čejpová describes the feeling: “Bittersweet like the coffee at Porthania!” she laughs.
The best part of this analogy? Alumni, too, are welcome anytime to the office for a cup of Joe!
Read more about the Biosphere incubator programme here, and for questions, please contact programme manager Pedro Gensini at pedro.gensinimotoa@helsinki.fi or through LinkedIn.