Mid-term Check in with Bonnier Accelerator

Today marked the halfway point for the 2014 Bonnier Accelerator startups. The two teams, Abios Gaming and Codarica, made their mid-term pitches - explaining how their startups are developing and their business plans to an expert jury, who gave then gave them feedback and advice.

“The pitch was mainly focusing on updates that we have to our original business plan, so we had some very exciting partnerships to launch and talk about as well as next steps for us with future development,” says Rosalyn Knapp of Codarica, which aims to teach children to code with unique educational material. “It was really good to get pointers from them.”

Codarica recently launched its first app in the App Store, garnering it attention from Mashable and ABC News in the U.S. “The reception so far has been astounding, we’ve heard nothing but good reviews about it,” says Knapp.

For Abios Gaming, which aims to be the go-to place for e-Sport fans, the pitch was a chance to talk about new goals and how they’re moving forward with their business plan.

“Since we got here, we’ve been working on our business-to-business deal, where we are selling our content to other businesses that are interested in e-sports but don’t really have the resources  to make the kind of content themselves that we offer,” says Anton Janér, CTO. “We talked about what we’ve done so far. It was the first real pitch to them, which was interesting and a lot of fun, actually. I think we’re getting to know ourselves and our company and product a lot better so we know what we’re talking about when we get in there.”

For Fredrik Olsson, CEO of Refunder.se and mentor to Abios Gaming, his goal is to help the team boil down the business into basics and help them get to revenue streams as soon as possible. And he was proud of how his mentees did in their pitch. “They did really, really well and they seem to have focused on the right things. The next thing is for them to get out there and leverage on what they’ve been doing already.”

Along with Olsson, the expert jury included Ulrika Saxon, head of Bonnier Growth Media and fellow Growth Media staff Fei-Fei Jing and Jonas von Hedenberg, both of whom have served as mentors to Codarica; Elisabeth Palombo, VP, Bonnier Media University and project manager for Bonnier Accelerator; Jenny Collén Gustafsson, consultant, who helped develop the program together with Elisabeth Palombo; also joining was Markus Kitunen of Bonnier Growth Media.