A look back at Belgo - French Startup Weekend

Date:
Changed on 03/01/2020
Ten PhD students and engineers from the Inria Lille - Nord Europe centre took part in the Belgo-French Start-up Weekend which took place from 14-16 September 2018 at the CCI Grand Lille. This edition of the Start-up Weekend furthers Franco-Belgian relations by welcoming participants, jury members and companies from France and Belgium. A wonderful collaboration to mark our relationship with Belgium. Students from École Centrale Lille and the EDHEC business school were also present.

A weekend to promote the startup creation

The participants who wished to pitched their start-up idea in one minute in order to win as many votes as possible and build a team around their project. As a result, the participants chose 10 finalists. Among these projects were three coming from Inria Lille Nord - Europe.

These three days were punctuated by mini-conferences by experts , contributions by coaches in each team to work on the concept of the company, yoga sessions for relaxation...  Networking took pride of place during the entire weekend, since all of the stakeholders of the French and Belgian innovation ecosystem were present: investors, incubators and accelerators, the INPI (French National Intellectual Property Institute), lawyers specialising in start-ups, management firms, representatives of intermediate-sized companies or corporations in the region.

Logo franco-belge

 


The prizewinners from our team

In the prizewinners from this startup weekend we find these scientists from our centre :

  • EY Ventury Avocats’ choice : “ADDRY” Blimp-Drone project led by Jijju Thomas, Haïk Silm, Francisco Lopez Ramirez (Non-A-post search-team). This project originated from the Non-A-post team's research from Inria Lille - Nord Europe.
  • Euratechnologies’ choice : Bankiz project led by the team joined by Matthieu Berthomé (Fun project-team).
  • Start-up Weekend third place : Yes!WeTeach, which included Marwa Eldiwiny (Defrost project-team).
  • Start-up Weekend winner : SeetyGo project which included Yaroslav Averyanov (Modal project-team) and Lakhdar Meftah (Spirals project-team).