In the food and agriculture battle, Canada’s LOOP competed against the UK’s Vertical Future. While LOOP brings back value to rejected food by transforming them into products, their opponent Vertical Future are pioneers of fully automated vertical farming. In a closely contested showdown, Vertical Future was able to convince the jury of its business case and potential to scale.
The Global Final is the culmination of a year-long startup competition with 100+ online and live events and 25,000 startup applications from 107 countries. Adapting to the pandemic, Get in the Ring transitioned all scheduled live pitch battles into online events with a focus on dealmaking.
This season, the Global Startup Competition collected numerous stamps on its virtual passport – from Miami to Osaka, New Delhi to Barranquilla and Khartoum to Budapest. Over 100 winning startups from each city event were invited to the Global Meetup starting in March 2021, where they competed in the semi-finals but most importantly were matched with industry-leading corporates, investors and governments to have dealmaking meetings to help scale their solution.
The two boldest startups from each of the four key domains – Health, Energy, Food & Agriculture, and FinTech – were chosen to pitch at the Global Final, in front of a jury that included Tanja Kufner (Expert Advisor -European Commission), Kees Koolen (Founding Partner – EQT Ventures), Witte van Cappellen (Chief Supply Chain Officer – Hero Group), Artem Khlebnikov (Director Open innovation & Strategic Partner – Danone), Pascal Huijbers (CTO – Wester Europe, Fujitsu), Nadine Klokke (CEO – Knab) and Hendrik Halbe (CEO – Unknown Group), amongst others. Also on the jury were Dror Tamir (CEO – Hargol FoodTech) and Valer Pop (CEO – Lifesense Group), both of whom were global winners of the Get in the Ring Global Startup Competition in 2017. After winning Get in the Ring as a one-product company Lifesense Group quickly scaled both their product portfolio to 5 health continence solutions which are currently being sold in 98 countries worldwide – an inspirational example for the finalists of this year what a journey could look like after winning the Get in the Ring competition.