Carpathian Startup Fest 2021

The biggest startup event in Podkarpackie Region!

It was definitely one of the largest, if not the largest, event connecting both startups and scale-ups in the region of south-eastern Poland. A bottle crusher, an innovative website for real estate agents and an algorithm for designing new peptide drugs, as well as a program to improve the work of design engineers and a flying tank - these are startup projects that won top awards at Carpathian Startup Fest 2021 - the first festival for startups that was organized by the Rzeszów Regional Development Agency - OSS Project Partner from Poland.

Over 140 projects at various stages of development, ranging from ideas, through start-ups, to scale-ups, applied to participate in the event. The most interesting of them presented themselves to investors. They were assessed by investment funds and individual investors.

The compact crusher built by the startup Maas Loop turns glass bottles into sand, thus reducing the volume of garbage by 80%, and thus the cost of their disposal. - As a result, a restaurant can fit waste in one bin instead of five. It is the idea of the Maas Loop company, which won the 1st place in the Startup category and the award in the Smart specializations category of the Podkarpacie region: Quality of life (a total of PLN 20,000) during the first Carpathian Startup Fest 2021. The practical idea of a glass bottle crusher was the one that gained the most votes from jurors evaluating startups, and among them were businessmen, representatives of over 20 investment funds and investors, business environment institutions, local government, as well as the government in the person of Małgorzata Jarosińska-Jedynak, secretary of state in Ministry of Funds and Regional Policy.

We, the OSS Project Partners, are even more honored that we were able to present our project to such a wide audience, including such important figures from the startup scene. The Communication Manager, and at the same time the Regional Project Coordinator - Marek Duda of the Rzeszów Regional Development Agency, presented the general assumptions and results of the first phase of our project. It was also an opportunity to present the activities that were included in the Action Plan created for our Region as part of the OSS project.