This year’s STup! competition is just about to start. As of tomorrow, the university startup teams will get their chance to impress the judges and secure their spot in Saturday’s finals. However, no matter the final outcome, all teams get a valuable opportunity to network and present their work to an international audience of judges and speakers at the event, as well as their peers.

In addition to all that this event can bring to student startup teams, the organizers from the Faculty of Economics’ Student Business Incubator have gone one step further this year and organized the SPI Business Meetup.

Oriented towards local businesses, startups, and other tech ecosystem contributors, the meetup is an excellent addition to the STup! competition program.

While the competition itself is oriented towards universities and students, we are happy that SPI recognized the importance of branching out and connecting with other members of the community in this way.

The meetup was held at The Works coworking space and was well organized. It offered a chance for the members of the local tech and startup community to get to know the international panel of judges of STup!2021 and what they do through a series of short presentations each of the judges did, as well as network and connect afterward.

Therefore, we are happy this event took place as it truly gives an opportunity for the local community as a whole and the international members of the STup! judging panel to connect and possibly work together in the future. Hopefully next year more people will be able to attend the meetup as right now we still have some rules to obey regarding public gatherings.

However, for those of you who didn’t get the chance to attend, we have an overview of the speakers and what they do.

As all of them mentioned at the event: feel free to contact them if you are interested in what they do or you think there might be a chance for collaboration that might benefit you, your startup, and/or Split’s startup ecosystem.

Paulina Bialek
Paulina is a Business Development Director at Expara IDM Ventures (Singapore), Southeast Asia’s pioneer and leader in early-stage venture capital and venture services, as well as an experienced provider of acceleration, incubation, entrepreneurship training, and mentorship to start-ups from all around the world.

Michael Chaffe
Michael is the CEO of Wolves Summit (Poland), a summit that attracts more than 2500 participants from 80 countries providing 100+ hours of immersive educational content, keynotes, and startup pitches, created for connecting angel investors, VC funds, tech talents, and corporations with the most promising startups in the CEE region to help ambitious founders scale and foster international economic growth.

Diana Florescu
Diana is a managing partner at Grai Ventures (The United Kingdom), a digital media and venture building studio which partners with entrepreneurs and corporations to validate, build, and scale new products and business by leveraging the abilities of entrepreneurs and the vast resources of corporations to develop new business, with a focus on execution speed and future growth in overlooked markets and offerings.

Arjan Goudsblom
Arjan is a director and co-founder at Preneurz.Amsterdam (Netherlands), a consulting organization founded on the belief that universities are vital players in entrepreneurial ecosystems, both as a learning environment and as a breeding ground for entrepreneurs, partners with economic development agencies, governments, and universities to build in-house capacities at universities, connecting them to both local and international entrepreneurial ecosystems, with the focus on connecting academic knowledge hubs to SME’s, resulting in a more prepared workforce, new employment opportunities, and future growth.

Gergo Gulyas
Gergo is a member of the Board of Directors at Startup Campus Incubator (The United Kingdom and Hungary), a global program for innovative businesses, from the idea phase until market entry, that provides training and education, incubation, international market entry, and investment services in several major cities of the world.

Sara Korchmaros
Sara is a co-Founder at cLAB Ventures (United Kingdom), a qualified network helping life-saving inventions to reach their full potential in the field of cancer diagnostics and treatment, that connects innovators with organizations who are willing to innovate or seeking to invest in projects which can create a world where cancer is a curable disease.

We’d like to thank the team from the Student Business Incubator for the invitation to take part in the meetup and wish them success with the competition on Friday and Saturday.

We also hope that this year’s SPI Business Meetup will continue to grow alongside STup! competition and become a standard part of its program in the future.

In the end, we invite all of you to keep an eye on STup!2021 in the following days as there are many more good things to come!