The 2013 Intel Global Challenge took place last week and Romanian startup Gameleon walked away from the event as the winner of the ‘Best Pitch’ and the first-prize winner in the ‘Internet, Mobile, and Software Computing’ category.
The Challenge, having just completed its 9th edition, is run by the Intel Foundation and awarded a total 100.000 dollars to this year’s winners. The event drew more than 18.000 entries from over 60 countries worldwide. From them, 28 teams from more than 20 countries were selected to participate in the final. Gameleon earned its way into the competition by finishing fourth at the Intel Business Challenge Europe event.
The Romanian startup offers an open-source service, which provides users the ability to create, publish, and play cross-platform HTML5 games. inventures.eu caught up with co-founder Victor Popescu, who filled us in on their past, their winnings from the Intel event, and their upcoming plans.
The company, which currently counts four employees, incorporated this past January after obtaining an undisclosed amount of funding from Sofia-based seed fund and accelerator Eleven. Although the company is officially located in Bulgaria, the startup team is fully Romanian and lives and works in Bucharest. As a result of their success in the Intel Global Challenge, Gameleon received 5.000 dollars for having the best pitch and 10.000 dollars for taking first place among Internet, Mobile, and Software Computing entries.
“We are looking to close an investment round, get to version 1.0 with the product and raise the community to 10.000 users,” said Popescu. “At that point we estimate being able to break even with our monthly operations.”
Other CEE participants
Although Gameleon ended up as the big winner from the CEE region, it was not the only participant from the region as Slovakian password-authentication startup Excalibur also wound up among teams competing at the final event. This is not the first time that we have encountered Excalibur, as earlier this summer they won 500.000 euros at the Telekom Innovation Contest, sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. That victory followed their pick-up of the ITU Young Innovator Award and success at last year’s StartupAwards.SK competition.
Stay tuned for more success stories from the region!
Thanks to Mircea Goia for pointing us to the story.
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