It was that time of year again, time for the Rheinland Pitch Winter Finals!
It’s a wrap! And the winners were…
Defence Tech: Auxsys
Female Founders: Youro
Enterprise SaaS: Neo Predicts
The Rheinland Pitch was founded in 2013 by Lorens Gräf, Matthias Gräf, and me – and since grew to become Germany’s largest startup pitching event. It is open to all startups (for free) and a public audience on a regular basis ever since.
Check out https://rheinlandpitch.de for more photos and the next events.
Recently I was honored to be invited to “Migrant Momentum“, an event focusing on immigrants and entrepreneurship during the Startup Week DUS to speak a bit on a panel about fundraising for early-stage startups and moderate one of the break-out sessions on fundraising hurdles and success metrics for fundraising for founders.
I had really no idea of what to expect, but it turned out to be one of those rare “lightning in a bottle” event where the atmosphere and the attitude of everybody participating was contagiously positive in the extreme.
Many thanks to the event organisers Avela Gronemeyer and Archita Fritz for creating such a pleasant and productive atmosphere!
And I wasn’t at all prepared for the feedback I received… Made me blush.
“[…] thank you so much for the passion, energy, expertise, and heart you brought to yesterday’s “Migrant Momentum”. We received unbelievable feedback from the “Investor Circles” – your authenticity, openness to honest talks, passion for your work, and your humanity was clearly felt.”
– A. Gronemeyer, Event Organiser
Germany’s largest pitching event rolls on: Recently, the Rheinland Pitch‘s regular “Summer Finals” edition took place at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf (HSD) in co-operation with Gründungszeit HSD!
Photos by Manor Lux.
Recently I had a blast prepping the startup finalist for the C3 pitching competition, back again at the Gateway Excellence Startup Center at the University of Cologne with my Pitching Masterclass, Startup Edition.
Interested in my Pitching Masterclass for your students, startups, or employees too? Get in touch!
It was initially created to serve the Rheinland Pitch back in 2013 to help educate our regional founders and prepare them for raising money – and has been constantly evolving and updated ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served – and counting.
The Pitching Masterclass Startup, Student, and Corporate Edition used to only be available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or people lucky enough to be in an educational institution, incubator, accelerator, or corporate innovation program who had booked me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.
Today, in addition to the on-premise editions, my Pitching Masterclass is available to anyone everywhere as on-demand eLearning, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download.
Also available in bundles, especially popular with companies and organisations, including prepaid online mentoring & support vouchers for employees, booked and managed by the teams themselves on demand.
Recently I had the pleasure to be back at the Igniton+ Demo Night, this time experiencing the startup that I’ve been (b2b SaaS for early stage sales & pitch) coaching in the 19th batch of the Ignition+ program from Digihub Düsseldorf & Rheinland winning “best pitch” of the batch.
UPDATE: Following the tradition set by the startup I coached in the previous batch, OSPHIM – Layer Performance went on to be awarded “Digital Start-up of the Year 2025” by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, BMWE) for their outstanding digital innovation! FTW!
Congratulations Laura and Lukas of Layer Performance! Perfectly delivered pitch, very well deserved!
(BTW, if you too want to improve your pitch, you can enroll in my Pitching Masterclass online – available anytime, anywhere.)