IoT startup Omnio wins DKK 500.000 investment at pitch competition

Omnio was the winning team at this year’s SEED Discovery day. CFO Mikkel Thøgersen managed to present a convincing pitch, which highlighted the significant market potential in Omnio.

Before competition day

Preparing for SEED Discovery day takes a lot of work. The participating teams need to be prepared to answer critical and complex questions from the jury. One of the ways to overcome the anxiety of pitching in front of a jury and 200+ people in the audience is taking part in the Pitch training day. This is held a week prior to the competition and provides the finalists an opportunity to get feedback on their pitch. Along with most of the other finalists, Omnio also participated in the pitch training day hosted by jury member Tine Thygesen.

Mikkel Thøgersen, CFO in Omnio gave us his take on the pitch training day:

“It was a great experience for us to participate in the Discovery Day. We especially found the pitch preparation with Tine Thygesen from Founder’s House valuable. She really helped us fine tune our message.”

Tine Thygesen is a serial entrepreneur and has raised more than 5 million Euro for the companies she has been involved in. Learn more about her and read her valuable advice about pitching in the blogpost: ” The Secret Science of Raising Money — A Guide for Entrepreneurs”.

Competition day:

The location at DTU Skylab and Investors corner is always a big contributor to the entrepreneurial atmosphere surrounding the competition.

Many of the finalists arrived early to prepare their pitches and to get comfortable with the situation.

During the competition, all finalists were given 5 min. to pitch. The pitch was followed by a questioning session with the jury to evaluate things like market potential and scalability.

This year’s competition consisted of many great teams with good cases. These ranged from B2C festival apps to advanced B2B IoT management tools. The finalists were Pre.do, Sawy, HiveOnline,JustBring, Penstable, Omnio, FestivALL, TheCode, OBI+ and BuzzMe.

In the end, the winning team stood out from the crowd. Besides pitching in their company t-shirts, Omnio appeared well-rehearsed and prepared to answer even the most challenging questions from the jury.

Omnio won both Baker Tilly’s DKK 10.000 cash prize for “Most innovative idea” and the investment of DKK 500.000. Managing Partner in SEED Capital Ulla Brockenhuus-Schack motivated the jury’s choice by saying that Omnio had experienced a real pain through their careers and that they might just have a scalable business on their hands.

Omnio enables businesses to scale Industrial IoT solutions faster and cheaper. Their platform connects with all devices and IoT platforms and works as a universal translator for industrial device communication.

Another finalist, Penstable, took home Arrow’s DKK 10.000 cash prize for “Best pitch”.

Niels Fibæk-Jensen, Founder of penstable was awarded “Best pitch”

Whats next?

About winning Discovery Day, Omnio’s CEO, Mikkel Sørensen says:

“The Discovery Day is a great platform for getting exposure to the investor community. In just the few days since the competition we have been in contact with a number of both Danish and international VCs and angels. They really like the vision of what Omnio will mean as an infrastructure component for the industrial Internet of Things and they see that we have traction. The next steps from here will be to close our first round of funding and to find talented developers and automation engineers who want to make an impact on the industrial Internet of Things.”

Founders of Omnio Mikkel Sørensen and Mikkel Thøgersen with their angel investor Rasmus Blom.

Lastly, we would like to thank all of the applicants, finalists, investors and sponsors for their engagement in this year’s Discovery Day. We hope to see you next year!