#Silicon valley techcrunch tv#

She said she would work with TechCrunch Battlefield editor Samantha Stein to help train the start-up teams for the high-pressure pitch at the event, which will also be livestreamed online to the site's big global audience. Preparing for high pressureĮLEVACAO founder and chief executive Marisa Warren worked with former Airtree Ventures community manager Julia French, who now runs a tech start-up community called Founders for Founders, to pitch the idea of an Australian Battlefield conference to TechCrunch in the US over a number of months. Companies must be pre-series A funding, must have a finished and working product (as opposed to an idea on a slide deck) and have founders who are Australian or New Zealand residents. The Australian event will run on November 16 in Sydney at the Australian Technology Park and will see 15 early stage start-ups compete for a $25,000 non-equity funding injection and an all-expenses paid trip to compete at TechCrunch's flagship San Francisco Battlefield event in 2018.Īpplications are now open, with the event is aimed at finding fledgling companies that have yet to make the radar of the media and most investors.

#Silicon valley techcrunch tv#

The event will be familiar to viewers of US comedy TV show Silicon Valley, which featured fictitious start-up Pied Piper exploding to prominence by winning the contest. Iterations of the Startup Battlefield outside of the US already exist in London and Berlin, and Facebook has also sponsored an African contest, which will take place in Nairobi, Kenya, in October. Julia French, of Founders for Founders, and Marisa Warren, CEO of ELEVACO, convinced TechCrunch to bring its Battlefield event to Australia. The contest aims to unearth and launch little-known start-ups on to the big stage and has been running in Silicon Valley since 2007 as part of TechCrunch's high-profile Disrupt conferences.įormer contestants include Dropbox and Yammer, and the contest boasts impressive statistics that show the 648 competing companies have so far gone on to raise $US6.9 billion in funding, with 95 exits. Silicon Valley's biggest tech start-up pitching contest is heading to Australia after US publisher TechCrunch agreed a partnership with Australian founded global women tech founder program ELEVACAO foundation, to run a local version of its famous Startup Battlefield event.