Welcome to Slush and Slush 100 winner Faircado: Here’s all you need to know.

On the 30^th November and 1^st December, the world’s leading startup and tech festival Slush was held in Helsinki for the 16^th time. The organising body of the event is a nonprofit and the event’s mission has expanded to unbelievable heights – in the beginning, the purpose of the event was to bring together and celebrate the Finnish startup and entrepreneurial community through the event, to highlight the importance and local talent regionally and globally. The first event had around 500 attendees. Starting from 2015, the event has also been organised in Peking and Tokyo and by 2019, the event gathered 25 000 participants around the world.

Today, the mission of the nonprofit is to celebrate entrepreneurship globally: the two-day event features top keynote speakers across various fields, the event prides itself on global matchmaking, breathtaking event production and a part of their strategy states that to be exclusive and enable as many matches as possible, the event sells 8000 tickets to startups and investors. Slush as a brand has evolved to collaborate with multiple companies and expand to make the vision come to life, which is how an online startup and investor community Node by Slush and smaller global events Slush’D have been created.

Slush 100 is a startup competition, where top startups are picked to compete for a grand prize of a 1 000 000 € equity investment from Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, NEA and Northzone. The criteria changes yearly, as an example, the criteria for 2023 was that the startup must not be established no earlier than 2020 and has raised less than 750 000€ in equity fundraising.

The top 3 of Slush 100 this year comprised of three prominent startups: Congrify, Faircado and Lifeyear.
Congrify offers merchants a no-code payment solution to unify payment data across all payment platforms to improve your key performance integers and receive a deeper understanding of your finances to streamline them.
Lifeyear is an application that provides digitally delivered medical treatments for patients that are at risk for a cardiovascular disease to help reduce the cost of care and make patient management more effective.
Faircado is a website extension allowing you to quickly find secondhand or refurbished alternatives to online shopping, improving circular economy in the process.

The competition of Slush 100 2023 was intense due to the high quality of the pitches and great solutions to improve the world.

The winner of Slush 100 was Faircado, who received a 1 million euro investment to develop their startup further.

The concept behind Faircado is simple: it is currently easiest to shop and place orders online, where the active looking for alternative, second-hand or refurbished products is rather time consuming. Faircado bridges the gap and offers a solution to the market which increases the circularity of produced goods. When you are looking for something online, it is very easy to download the free Faircado extension to your browser and with the click of an AI activation, immediately receive secondhand products for cheaper that are similar in quality to the original. The cost model of the software as a service (SaaS) is receiving funds through partnerships and leads that are gathered through the extension and then sent forward to the second-hand stores. The team is also working on developing the app for a larger usage, which will be excited to follow.

I was very excited to learn of Faircado being the winner of the Slush 100 competition as their solution was simple, ready and effective, which is why I also downloaded the extension. After a couple of trials, I can safely say that the extension works well and I will be using the extension for years to come.

Good luck to Faircado!

Source:
Company visit to Slush HQ office with Tampere Entrepreneurship Society. 3.11.2023

Video. Slush 2023. The Slush100 Final. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juyi8J2E8SU

Introduction. Messukeskus. Case: Slush. https://messukeskus.com/tapahtumamarkkinointi/case-slush/

About Slush. https://slush.org/about/

Slush 100. https://slush.org/slush-100/

Website. Congrify. https://congrify.com/

Website. Lifeyear. https://lifeyear.com/

Website. Faircado. About. https://faircado.com/about/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=direct