Rockstart held a Demo Day for its AI acceleration program — the first of its kind in Europe—that will come to an end in May with Rockstart AI Summit. The startups took the stage to show off their progress and fundraising roadmap to an audience of investors, mentors, and other members of the AI ecosystem.
The startups have already spent about five months in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, based in the charming campus of the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS), a partner of the program. JADS hosted the Demo Day itself in its event space that used to be a chapel.
Artificial intelligence in different domains
“Our approach of running a purposely wide program for teams applying artificial intelligence in different domains has definitely proved beneficial for the startups, as it created an ideal environment for them to experiment with their products and value propositions,” said Rune Theill, co-founder, and CEO of Rockstart. “Today I’m extremely excited to see how much progress our startups have been able to make in just five months, and I’m sure they will keep growing rapidly after they graduate.”
At the beginning of the program, the startups received a cash injection of €20,000 together with a promise that one of them would also be eligible for extra funding from one of the program’s investors. As the program progressed, the additional funding of €200,000 went to Aziobot, a startup from India that’s working on autonomous cleaning robots for industrial and retail use.