Meet Our MediaMarkt StartupChallenge Winners

June 25, 2019

In Hackquarters, we describe ourselves as "startup accelerator & corporate innovation partner" and as a company founded in Turkey, we mainly collaborate with Turkish startups, even if we usually have our events/programs with global companies. The growing interest in our programs from international startups is one of those things that makes Hackquarters happy. We can say that retailtech startup applications to MediaMarkt Startup Challenge '19, made us pretty happy.

Yenal Gökyıldırım has made the opening speech for ou event, along with Kaan Akın.

MediaMarkt Startup Challenge '18 had great retailtech startups, but MMSC'19 startups were even better. From 11 startups we chose from over 100 applications, 3 of them were Greek startups.

MediaMarkt Startup Challenge '19 was opened by a speech from CEO of MediaMarkt Turkey & Greece, Yenal Gökyıldırım. Yenal Gökyıldırım said that they are happy to be working within the innovation community for 2 years with MediaMarkt Startup Challenge and looking forward to making this a traditional event. He pointed out that compared to 60 applications last year, this year MMSC'19 got more than 100 applications, 35 of them from abroad, and happy that the event got attention from countries such as Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Greece, Poland and more.

After Mr. Gökyıldırım, Kaan (you know which Kaan) was on stage for his opening remarks. He told how happy Hackquarters is to be working with MediaMarkt for the 2nd year in a row and how happy we are with the great applications we received from great retail startups.

We continued our event with startup presentations, with 5 mins of pitching time and 5 mins of Q&A for each startup. Our jury, who was grading the startups of MediaMarkt Startup Challenge '19, was;

Our jury for MediaMarkt Startup Challenge.

Yenal Gökyıldırım, CEO, MediaMarkt Turkey & Greece
Martin Wild, Chief Innovation Officer, MediaMarktSaturn
Sonja Moosburger, COO, MediaMarktSaturn N3XT
Murat Gigin, CEO, Tekfen Holding
Salih Zeki Sarıdanişmet, General Director, Demirören Media
Fatoş Karahasan, Consultant & Writer
Münir Kundakçı, Marketing and Operations Director, Microsoft Turkey
Kaan Akın, CEO, Hackquarters

After great presentations from 11 startups, our keynote speaker Martin Wild was on stage for his "Innovate or Die - Future of Retail" speech. Martin explained the vision of MediaMarktSaturn for innovation and the future of retail technologies. "Retailtech Hub is like Tinder between startups and corporates." said Martin Wild. RetailTech Hub hosted more than 50 startups since 2017 and most of them piloted projects with most of them. He also showcased current projects within MediaMarkt stores, such as Paul the AI based robot assistant and Paula the VR assistant.

Then comes the highlight of the day: Winners.

Winners!

And the winner is... Bagaj!

Voted by our prestigious jury, Bagaj has been chosen as the winner of MediaMarkt Startup Challenge '19. As the winner of 2019, Bagaj will be presented with the opportunity to be included in Retailtech Hub in Munich, and the entrepreneur network of Plug and Play. They will also have the chance to present at Retail Technologies Conference in Istanbul.

Poltio and Pegneon have been voted as 2nd and 3rd, respectively. They earned the chance to pilot in MediaMarkt and Tekzen stores, the chance to present at the Retail Technologies Conference in Istanbul. Poltio also got the chance to pitch for Chain Stores Association Members.

Bagaj
Poltio
Pegneon

We would like to congratulate all the winners!

About Bagaj (1st Place)

Bagaj is a locker service that can be used via a mobile phone app. You can use our lockers as luggage storage / left luggage service and leave your personal belongings to the lockers which are located in places such as city centers, venues, concert halls, and beaches.

About Poltio (2nd Place)

Poltio helps brands access, engage with and learn from their users by the help of interactive content. Platform modules integrated with our analytics engine provide detailed, real-time insights about your audience.

About Pegneon (3rd Place)

Pegneon is a serious games company specialized in developing educational video games for employee training. Eugene: a series of educational mini-games for the training of customer service agents and the GDPR game.

Hackquarters Team
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