Startup Sauna presented their Spring ’13 batch last night, graduating all 15 of the companies that participated. Typically the accelerator will leave a couple out of the final cut, but it comes as good news that they felt all participating startups met their standards. As always, Startup Sauna’s demo day drew a good crowd, the startup pitches were very well practiced, and the beer showed no signs of running out.
Startup Sauna captain Antti Ylimutka had a few minutes on stage to say farewell to the program, as this was his last batch he’ll be leading since the founding of Startup Sauna seven batches ago. The program has high turnover by design – they feel its important to rotate new people into leadership positions so they can keep the accelerator fresh by “burning it down and building it back up” every six months. Ylimutka’s special brand of energy will be missed from the program, and will be interesting to see how the new blood puts their own personality on Sauna. Ylimutka’s farewell can also be found on the Startup Sauna blog.
Taking over the program will be Juuso Koskinen, the current “Wingman”, and Juho Kokkola, who organized Summer of Startups 2012. For the first time Startup Sauna has been ruled by two engineering students from Aalto’s school of Science and Technology, so we’ll see how that impacts things.
Koskinen tells us they’re excited to be taking over the program, and will continue in Ylimutka’s footsteps “bigger and better.”
The participating companies included:
More information about the companies can be found on the Startup Sauna website, and with more coverage in the future.
