Catapult: Kickstarter Summer 2022 Edition group picture;
Credit: LHoFT
The third edition of the FinTech acceleration bootcamp, Catapult: Kickstarter 2022 Summer Edition, concluded on Friday 1 July 2022 with the cohort’s final pitches on the main stage at the ICT Spring 2022 in front of an esteemed jury and a public audience from the Luxembourg finance and technology ecosystem.
The programme was developed by the LHoFT Foundation in close collaboration with Luxembourg's Ministry of the Economy. Ten leading FinTech startups completed a two-week bootcamp. For the first time since the Catapult: Kickstarter launched in June 2021, the LHoFT was able to welcome the participants physically in Luxembourg.
After an intensive programme during which the participants attended classes centred on scaling their business and met with many mentors, stakeholders and potential partners from the Luxembourg ecosystem, the ten participants pitched their solutions on the final day of ICT Spring 2022 on the main stage.
According to the LHoFT, all the presentations were of an incredibly high quality and made it difficult for the judges to decide on just five that would become laureates of the programme and get access to up to €50,000 in subsidies from the Ministry of Economy to help them continue on their journey of growth within Luxembourg. After a tough deliberation, the jury decided that 10BE5, finmarie, Fundvis, Lynxai and Umazi were the Laureates of this Catapult: Kickstarter 2022 Summer Edition.
Franz Fayot, Luxembourg's Minister of the Economy, stated: "I am glad that participants [of] the 2022 Summer Edition of Catapult: Kickstarter have been able to join in a physical format and meet in person with the Luxembourg ecosystem. I am looking forward for the selected companies to launch operations in Luxembourg while contributing to the diversification of the local FinTech and start-up ecosystems through innovative solutions in fields such as data, Fundtech, identity management and sustainable finance".
Targeting FinTech startups from around the world, Catapult: Kickstarter 2022 Summer Edition aimed to provide effective support and critical guidance to the ten firms, selected from over 180 applications, in their growth. In order to efficiently leverage the strengths of Luxembourg’s community and capabilities, the selected firms focused on delivering services to financial institutions (B2B), with particular emphasis on Insurtech, investment tech, LegalTech, RegTech, Fundtech, artificial intelligence (AI) and environmental, social and governance (ESG).
Catapult: Kickstarter 2022 Summer Edition was tailored to the particular stage of the participating FinTechs and structured around classroom tutorials, experts' talks, customer discovery, one-to-one meetings, pitching sessions, industry discovery sessions and mentorship sessions. The ten participating FinTech companies received support over those two weeks by about 20 partners, including Compellio, Luxembourg For Finance (LFF), Luxembourg Sustainable Finance Initiative (LSFI) and Middlegame Ventures (MGV), guiding them through business models, funding strategies and industry product testing.
The jury was composed of Nicoletta Centofanti, Sustainability Adviser and General Manager at LSFI, Frédéric Becker, Project Manager at Luxembourg's Ministry of the Economy, Owen Reynolds, Associate at Expon Capital, Corentin Dubucq, Head of Retail Central Europe+Turkey & Marketing Innovation at BNP Paribas, and Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the LHoFT.
