July, 2020
We don’t know about you, but it seems like 2020 hasn’t been THE year so far. Fortunately, we are a “glass half full, not half empty” company (Beverage pun intended), which is why we wanted to update you on some global office highlights from these past months.
We were selected to join PwC’s Raise Program 7.0, guiding promising companies and 60+ institutional investors through their fundraising process. After 10 weeks of workshops and networking, our cohort was introduced to the market and 100+ investors at the Investor Day last week. For the first time ever, the entire programme was run digitally – “a fantastic testament to the resilience of the venture industry!” Big shoutout to Alice Olafare for guiding us through Raise and congrats to fellow startups Eave, Sprintlaw, Optimitive, Leaf, Include, Rickshaw, and Eebria on the successful completion of the program.
Aside from the opportunities given to develop ourselves (kudos to all involved), we felt the need to get our hands dirty and help where we could. This is why we partnered up with Dutch Students for Entrepreneurship for their Students Against Corona Awards (SACA); a virtual, nationwide contest gathering interdisciplinary talents across the Netherlands’ top universities to combat the impact of the pandemic. The event resulted in 150+ student participants and 38 projects formed. Congrats to Lokale Markten – winner of SACA – who continued with their business following the awards and has just won the ‘Rotterdamse Ondernemerspitch’ out of 100+ applications.
While settling in their new Shanghai offices, our China team was selected (from 2000 applications from around the globe) to participate in Plug and Play’s The Leading Brand & Retail Accelerator. Their3-month program – with a consortium of corporate partners on topics ranging from reducing friction in the customer experience to new business models – is helping us to get better acquainted with doing business in Japan. We also got to the final round of Unilever China’s Coding Your Future Hackathon, finding the most innovative business solutions and best AI solutions currently available. Exciting stuff!
You have to be tough to make it in New York. New York Tough. Well, it’s safe to say our US team was up for the challenge. We even shared our experience in adapting to new challenges and opportunities presented by the pandemic at London & Partners and NUMA New York’s Global Startup Panel: Innovating During a Crisis. We got interviewed by TwentyFour as part of their podcast series covering selected scale-ups that successfully expanded to the US and were featured in a recent episode of Lennart van der Ziel’s Growtribute Podcast, discussing business networking secrets and more. Moreover, Dashmote has taken part in a recently published research and e-book Taking the Big Leap by Halve Maen – in conjunction with B. Building Business and PRLab – zooming in on the top challenges and best practices when expanding to NYC and Boston.
Let’s get real here for a second. The past months – at times – were no fun ride for us either. Still, our incredible team pulled through and with focus and dedication, we are ready to rumble… possibly more than ever. We can’t wait to show you what we have in store for the times ahead, moving us all towards a truly data-driven world. Now let’s go kick some ass.