EntryPoint Europe

☀️ While most people are on summer vacation, our startups are hard at work

Some are polishing their products ahead of a new go-to-market season. Others are deep in negotiations with potential investors, gearing up for their next funding round.

💪 We're excited to share that our portfolio company Optiroq has advanced to the next round of the selection process for the Fit 4 Start #17 acceleration program by Luxinnovation GIE - the pitching session at Luxembourg Venture Days, taking place October 14-15, 2026 in Luxembourg City. Teams further selected for the program receive targeted coaching, mentoring, and funding for six months, starting in January 2027.

📈 This year, Fit 4 Start set a new record: 556 applications from around the world, surpassing last year's record of 496. From this pool, the jury will select just 24 startups - meaning the odds of making the cut are roughly 4%, or 1 seat for every 23 applicants.

Making it this far is already a great achievement. We wish the Optiroq team the best of luck in the upcoming pitching session. We believe in their pitching skills - as we do in every team in our portfolio - but this level of competition demands nothing less than full preparation.

✨ Here's hoping they make the most of the time between now and mid-October to shine in front of the jury.

👏 Our first acceleration program is officially complete - but EntryPoint Europe is just getting started

Sixteen weeks of hard work - both online and onsite - are now behind us.
And what a journey it has been.

A journey full of ups and downs, questions and breakthroughs, long days, countless pitch‑deck iterations, and more than a few eureka moments.
Our founders have only begun their climb to the top, and we’ll stay close as they continue rising. We believe deeply in their potential, and we hope we helped them accelerate fast enough to start winning on this path. From here, we’ll keep supporting our alumni in a more relaxed, long‑term mode.

⚡️ A few highlights worth underlining:
- 150+ applications received, with 10% in deeptech
- Founders from 44 countries applied
- 19 startups selected for the online cohort
- 6 teams invited to the onsite phase and funded by us
- 200+ hours of hands‑on work with founders
- 9 highly experienced mentors
- 2 startups have already secured their next round of funding
- Dozens of people from the global VC community who supported our founders and us throughout the program

💪 Meet the great founders who worked hard during the program:
- Axion Lab - Sergei Maslennikov and Roman Evstigneev
- Evimple - Kseniia Tiumeneva and Sabina Basalaeva
- Joblin - Aleksei Kobzarev
- noqa - Pavel Shakhanin and Sergey Ustinov
- Optiroq - Vadim Sayafarov
- trona - Mikalai Suzdaltsau

🙌 A huge thank you!
To everyone who supported this batch: mentors, experts, partners, speakers, and ecosystem friends. Thank you for being part of this journey and for giving your time, energy, and insights.
Oleg Timoshenko, Mike Erman, Danny Chepenko, Peter Kreynin, Alex Felman, Egor Ivanov, Egor Zabralov, Paul Oyer, Mark Shmulevich, Kiryl Valoshyn, Patrick Driver, Cyril Shtabtsovsky, Alex Levkin, Orkun Özbatur, Fabrizio Bellina, Aleksei Zolotarev, Marielle Kropf, Julien Gharrou, Sara Oliveira, Mikael Da Silva, Mickael Borger, Vic Gershov, Dursun Halimova, Eugene Severenkov, Laurent LATHIEYRE, Olga Trichet, Marko Mihic Jeftic, Rowan MacDonald, Serge Borg, Michael Duval, Arnaud Clément, Prof. Kelvin Willoughby, Lily Wang, Vitalie SCHIOPU, Nikita Nathan Hartschenberg, David Yang, Ph.D., Virginia Baillie Strong, Alex Ustinov, Martine B., Matthieu Lannegrand, Dr. Ricardo Godinez-Moreno, Thierry Fromes, Alexander Turkot, Max Vydrin, Georgy Potapov

📢 Nexus: Their First Big Stage
At Nexus Luxembourg, our founders delivered strong, confident pitches - for some, it was their first time presenting to such a large audience and at an event of this scale. They pushed hard throughout the program, and now they have everything they need to keep climbing.

🏔 As the classic said: “It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ’n’ roll.”
We hope we made their first steps on that road a little easier.
Now it’s our turn to take a breath, reflect, and come back with plans for the next batch.

Stay tuned, the next chapter is already in motion. 🚀

📢 Another strong milestone from our cohort - this time from the home‑services space.

We’re happy to share that Joblin has secured new angel investment as part of their ongoing Seed round. A well‑deserved step forward for a team building something truly needed in Europe.

Joblin (https://joblin.lu/) is rethinking how people book home services. Instead of a classic marketplace, they offer a luxury concierge service experience, but available to everyone through technology. The customers' role remains completely passive. They just need to briefly describe what needs to be done in a couple of seconds, and Joblin's agentic AI will handle the rest by asking just a few additional questions. And all this to deliver the service in less than 24 hours. The traction they’re seeing shows how much residents and service providers have been waiting for a solution that brings transparency, speed, and trust to everyday home tasks.

Their Seed round remains open.
If you’d like to connect with the founders, just reach out - we’re happy to make the intro.

🏁 Wrapping Up Weeks 11 & 12: Founder Stories, Pitch Refinement, and VC‑Level Feedback

The final two weeks of the first EntryPoint Europe onsite batch were packed with powerful insights: from the journey of a rising Luxembourg startup to deep work on pitch preparation and a live session with a leading early-stage local VC fund.

🚀 Learning From Partao’s Growth Story
We began with Virginia Baillie Strong from partao, who shared their success story and the lessons learned along the way. She emphasized how essential it is to speak directly with customers - nothing replaces real conversations when it comes to understanding their needs. She also highlighted the effectiveness of the 5 Whys method for uncovering the root causes behind the problems a startup aims to solve.

🎤 Pitch Training & Deck Design With Alex Ustinov
Our founders then worked intensively on their pitches and deck design with Alex Ustinov from Beavers Brothers Global (who developed our branding as well). These sessions provided direct, actionable recommendations on how to strengthen both delivery and structure. Many startups tend to overlook the design aspect of their decks, yet it often determines whether the audience truly understands the value of the product. Even the strongest idea can be lost if it isn’t communicated clearly and visually.

💼 Pitching to Expon Capital With Lily Wang
We closed the onsite with a pitching session hosted by Lily Wang from Expon Capital, who generously joined us to evaluate the cohort. Together, we saw how much the founders have grown over the past 12 weeks - how they refined their strategies, pivoted when needed, and evolved their products and narratives. We were proud to showcase their progress and grateful for the valuable external feedback, especially the strong assessment from outside.

🎯 Next Stop: Nexus Luxembourg
We’re now heading toward Nexus Luxembourg on the 10th-11th of June, where our founders will pitch from the main stage to a large, high‑caliber audience. They’re ready to push hard, polish their pitches, and make every minute count.

More updates coming soon!

🔦 Week 10 Highlights: Fundraising in 2026 and the Future of AI

Week 10 brought two exceptional speakers who shared high‑level insights on the state of fundraising in 2026 and the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence.

💸 Fundraising Insights From Nikita Hartschenberg
We opened the week with a session from one of our distinguished mentors Nikita Nathan Hartschenberg (Amazon Web Services (AWS)), who provided a sharp overview of the current venture capital environment and best practices for fundraising. Key takeaways included the importance of maintaining multiple touchpoints with VCs, staying in regular contact, and demonstrating that your team has the capacity to grow the company over the next decade. And for founders working in highly specialized niches — such as robotics — the message was clear: find investors who truly understand your domain. That’s where the smartest money comes from.

🤖 AI Evolution & “Three Magic Crystals” With David Yang
On Thursday, we welcomed David Yang, Ph.D., Co‑Founder & President of Newo.ai and Founder of ABBYY. David shared his framework of the three magic crystals required to build a successful startup, illustrating each point with real‑world examples. He also gave a live demo of Newo, an AI tool that captures incoming calls when you can’t pick up — turning them into qualified leads. The demo worked like magic and showcased what a high‑potential product looks like in practice. What stood out most: even with decades of experience and a strong product, David’s team still invested time into customer development to precisely understand the pain they were solving.

🏁 Approaching the Finish Line
As we head into the final stretch, the focus shifts toward refining strategies based on everything learned so far — and finalizing pitches and decks ahead of Nexus Luxembourg. Stay tuned — we’ll be sharing cohort and program updates as they come.

📢 Great news from our cohort - the first startup has secured angel investment as part of their Seed round.

We’re excited to share that noqa has closed the first tranche of their Seed round from a Luxembourg business angel. A big congratulations to the team! 🔥

noqa.ai is an agentic QA automation platform with a strong focus on testing mobile apps and games. Its AI-powered technology tests apps and games the way a real user would, helping teams ship faster with less manual work and without scaling QA headcount.

The team has several paid pilots with consumer apps and game development companies.

This is just the beginning of their ongoing Seed round. If you’re interested in joining, ping us, and we’ll be happy to make an intro.

🤝 EntryPoint Europe × Alzette Valley
Strengthening connections, expanding access, and supporting founders across Luxembourg.

We’re excited to welcome Alzette Valley as the new ecosystem partner of EntryPoint Europe.

This organization plays an important role in strengthening Luxembourg’s innovation landscape, serving as a dynamic platform that bridges entrepreneurs and investors while offering education, tools, mentorship, and strategic support to help founders navigate early‑stage challenges and build meaningful relationships within the ecosystem.

As an ecosystem partner, Alzette Valley adds complementary support to our program and our founders throughout their journey in Luxembourg - from integration into the local community to exposure across the broader startup scene.

From our side, we commit to bring, guide, and advise more high‑potential founders into the ecosystem and contribute to its continued development. Our goal is to help ambitious teams integrate faster, connect deeper, and create meaningful value within Luxembourg’s innovation economy.

For founders joining us from Eastern Europe & Central Asia, this partnership means deeper access to the people, networks, and organizations shaping Luxembourg’s innovation economy.

We’re grateful to the Alzette Valley team for partnering with us and look forward to creating meaningful value together for the founders we serve.

☝️ Week 8 Highlights: Product‑Market Fit and a Real Founder Journey

Week 8 brought powerful insights to our cohort - from navigating product‑market fit to hearing the real story of a fast‑growing startup.

🔥 Going Through Product‑Market Fit With Matthieu
The week kicked off with a brilliant session from Matthieu Lannegrand - ex-CEO of Sapato.ru, KUPIVIP.RU, and most recently CarPrice - who walked us through his hands-on experience reaching product-market fit and adapting go-to-market strategies across three web companies he led. A standout insight: map out a value curve to see whether your offer genuinely addresses your customers' biggest pain points better than your competitors do. And a sharp warning: if you need to educate your customer too much, you're already in the danger zone.

🚀 A Real Founder Story With Vitalie
We closed the week with Vitalie SCHIOPU from ClimateCamp, who shared the evolution of his startup - from early market discovery and first customers (yes, before having a product, as Lean suggests) to fundraising and scaling. He walked the cohort through how they identified the right product, what they built first, and how they grew into a stable, scalable company now working with Europe’s leading manufacturing enterprises.

✨ Week 9 has begun - more stories, more networking, more expert guidance. Time is running fast, and this is the moment for founders to accelerate and show real traction.

Stay tuned - more updates from EntryPoint Europe are on the way.

🤓 Week 7 Highlights: Taxation, Fundraising, and IP Strategy for Early‑Stage Startups

Week 7 brought three exceptional speakers who shared practical, experience‑driven insights on taxation in Luxembourg, early‑stage fundraising, and intellectual property strategy.

💼 Understanding Luxembourg Taxation
We opened the week with Michael Duval from Baker Tilly Luxembourg who guided our founders through the fundamentals of taxation in Luxembourg. Taxes and accounting can be overwhelming for young startups: the cost of mistakes is high, while the rules are rarely intuitive from day one. Michael delivered the session in an engaging quiz format that made even taxation feel dynamic and accessible - something we didn’t expect to say about taxes.

💶 Fundraising in the Luxembourg Ecosystem
Next, Arnaud Clément from Alzette Valley shared his perspective on raising early‑stage capital in Luxembourg. He highlighted how the local fundraising landscape differs from other countries, what founders should keep in mind, and which factors can significantly increase their chances of success. A key takeaway: fundraising in Luxembourg is challenging if you’re doing it alone: leveraging trusted partners and established networks makes a real difference. And yes, you already know the name of the program that can help with that 😉

🧠 Intellectual Property Strategy With Prof. Kelvin Willoughby from HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management
We closed the week with an insightful academic session on IP strategy. Many early‑stage founders treat IP as something to solve “later,” but misunderstanding or neglecting it can harm a startup quickly and irreversibly. Prof. Willoughby emphasized that early clarity on patents, trademarks, copyright, trade-secrets and competitive IP landscapes reduces risk and prevents costly conflicts. A well‑thought‑out IP strategy doesn’t take long to build, but it saves enormous time and money down the road.

🏢 Visit to Expon Capital
We also visited the Expon Capital office and had a productive conversation with Lily Wang. It’s clear that we can create meaningful synergies within the Luxembourg ecosystem, and we agreed to continue exploring this collaboration.

Week 8 has begun. More great speakers, more traction, and more right decisions ahead. Stay tuned for updates from EntryPoint Europe!