On Tuesday night, I had the privilege of pitching Auka and our new mobile payments app, Settle, in Helsinki at the Visa Everywhere Initiative. The pitch finals were held at Fintech Insider Live! at Slush 2018.
Taken from Visa’s website, “Visa Everywhere Initiative is a global innovation program that tasks start-ups to solve payments and commerce challenges of tomorrow, further enhance their own product propositions and provide visionary solutions for Visa’s vast network of partners.”
Visa received 164 applications from Nordic and Baltic-based startups and out of these, narrowed it down to four finalists who presented their solutions to Visa-set challenges during four-minute pitches.
The other finalists were Paytailor, Estonia; Ernit, Denmark; and CONNAX, Finland.
We are beyond delighted to announce that we won! Read the Norwegian press release here and the Finnish release, here. We took home the giant cheque for €50,000. We were also thrilled to learn we’d won audience favourite which saw an extra €5,000 being added to the total prize money.
Image courtesy of Visa
For us though, this win is worth so much more than the money, of course! This is one of the first (and definitely the highest) validations of our new Settle-focused business model – we’re very excited to get started on working closely with Visa. Together, we’re one step closer to realising our goal of digitising money and making it universally accessible.
To get in touch about this win, Settle, investing in Auka or anything else, click here.
