Desafio Brasil: Campinas Final’s Results

I know that has been a while, but I’m finally posting about the Campinas’ final of Brazil Challenge occurred last Friday. BoraNegociar.com (now http://www.negocicarros.com/) and Alkem are on the nationals that will occur on FGV and FIAP in São Paulo in the end of August.

The event was opened by Marcio Santos Filho, representing the challenge coordination. He presented some interesting data about the 150 startups that applied for the challenge. Among those startups, 52% started the challenge in a “.ppt stage” (just the idea, not actually a product and any income) and 36% already had some revenue. A curious data is that 45% of the participants applied motivated by the prize (R$ 5K in cash, R$30K in legal consultancy, R$30K in management consultancy and the presence in the world finals, including all expenses), but in the end almost all the participants (and winners) of the previous editions have recognized the networking and the learning process as the most valuable assets of the program.

The first screening of the challenge counted with 97 judges and 130 startups were approved for the next phase. In the next phase each startup had one mentor (77 mentors in total) that supported and oriented the teams to evolve their business models and business plans. In this first edition of the Campinas finals, 8 startups had officially applied and 6 were in the regional finals. Unfortunately only 3 could present their projects (1 gave up, VideoVivo couldn’t be here and asked to be part of the São Paulo finals and MeuCarrinho couldn’t arrive on time).

Before the startups’ presentation, Felipe Matos, founder of Inventta and organizer of the challenge in Campinas, presented his 10 lessons (actually 11) about how to approach an investor. We have a pretty similar opinion about it! If you can read in Portuguese, you should take a look.

10 licoes sobre como falar com um investidor

View more presentations from Felipe Matos

Alex Tabor shared his experience as founder and CTO of Peixe Urbano, the pioneer and the biggest deal-of-the-day website in Brazil. Founded 16 months ago, they already have about 800 employees and several job positions waiting for the right people. The best part of his presentation was about the fund raising in the beginning: “we’ve raised some seed money with some strategic angel investors from Silicon Valley, but what we wanted for real was the networking … the business were doing so well and with so much profit that we’ve never even touched that money”. That is really awesome!

After these introductions, the first startup to present its project was BoraNegociar.com, now Negocicarros.com . Starting as a platform for any reverse negotiation, they’ve pivoted to a platform of car reverse negotiation, somewhat like Carwoo, but with a different revenue model. Instead of charge the buyer, they intend to use sellers’ subscriptions as the main income source. The website is online and with several user (more than 800 Facebook likes), but the next main challenges are closing some deals and find a fourth co-founder with a business background.

The second startup to present was Hash, a multidisciplinary team from Ribeirão Preto offering a hospital bed side terminal, which intends to offer all the medical records, exams results and entertainment contents for the patients. As they couldn’t make its business model clear, they were not selected by the judges for the nationals, despite the potential of this product.

The third presentation (and the other winner) was Alkem, which is offering an eco-friendly solution that can be used, for example, to cut thick steel plates. Instead of using oil derivatives, they use water and a specific electrolyzer to produce the high energy gas used in the flame. It’s carbon free, low cost and a much safer solution. Because of the technical aspect of the solution, one of the main feedbacks was to make a less technical pitch, starting with the main concept.

Negocicarros and Alkem will join more 19 startups in the nationals, that will occur on August 30 (semifinals) and 31 (finals). The 6 finalists will have a demo space to present their solutions just after the semifinals.

For additional info, visit http://www.desafiobr.com.br/ and follow the news @desafiobrasil.