Summer Entrepreneurship Program (SEP)

The launchpad for ideas and tech teams with global ambitions.
The SEP helps entrepreneurial talents to develop and elaborate their own startup ideas: finding co-founders, identifying trends and problems, finding and building solutions, and pitching in front of Venture Capitalists (VCs) and business angels. On Demo Day, the talents and teams will present and pitch their vision in front of an audience and a jury to win €5,000 prize money.

April 6 - June 27

Program

Face-to-face and virtual

Format

March 7th, 2025

Application deadline

Target Group

We are looking for talents that strive to become entrepreneurs and tackle the largest problems of our time. We are especially looking forward to working with:

Technologists
Entrepreneurial-driven generalist/business person
Industry experts
Other (e.g. design)

Value Proposition

During the program, you will

Connect with tech and business talents and potential co-founders
Gain valuable insights into trends, technologies, and sustainability
Identify and validate significant problem opportunities and solutions,
Develop landing pages, prototypes and an MVPs,
Receive mentorship and coaching, and
Meet the Vali network, including students and alumni of ESMT.

Highlights

Participation is free
Pitch your idea in front of an expert and investor jury
The winning team wins prize money and a spot at the ESMT Demo Day

Phase 1 (on-site)

Teambuilding and problem identification

April 15-28, 2024

During the first phase of the Summer Entrepreneurship Program, our batch will receive a number of workshops and coaching sessions to identify an idea and problem and find potential co-founders.

Phase 2 (virtual)

Validation and Problem-Solution Fit

April 29 - June 23, 2024

During the second phase, teams will validate the problem and market opportunity through customer discovery. We help teams in hypotheses testing, prototyping and developing their MVP, by coaching, mentoring and providing access to the ESMT and Vali network.

Phase 3 (on site)

Fundraising strategy and pitching

June 24 - July 5, 2024

During the last phase of the program, participants prepare their fundraising strategy, financials and their pitch deck to pitch their idea in front of investors.

Vali Berlin Alumni

Disrupting the logistics industry

Senvo is a B2B SaaS solution for logistic departments across industries built by a team with more than 10+ years industry experience. Senvo automates manual processes and aggregates data, so that customers can optimize their logistic performance and spend while reducing their carbon footprint.

Marie Kober - Founder at Senvo, MBA2022

"During my time at ESMT, I took a deep-dive into Berlin’s vibrant startup ecosystem. Building up a network of successful founders and partaking in ESMT’s Incubator Vali Berlin was a great source of inspiration and fueled my motivation to start Senvo."

Visit their website

“
We contribute to solving global challenges like wildfires by providing real-time insights for prevention using Robotics and AI. Pushing robotics and AI technology beyond the limits to solve important issues is at the core of our company.
”

Andres Jimenez and Jhorman Perez

Co-founders of Robbi