Hungarian Startup Ideas Eyed by Investors

The Hungarian Startup University Program (HSUP) at the ELTE University in Budapest has come to an end: nearly 180 students participated in the program, the institutional HSUP team helped develop the ideas with several university programs, and potential investors are already negotiating with the best ones, the university informed MTI on Wednesday. 

The Hungarian Startup University Program (HSUP), launched by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office and organized by the National Innovation Agency, is the country's first online university startup training program, aimed at introducing students to modern entrepreneurship. ELTE has been an active participant since the beginning.

Almost 180 ELTE students have completed the first semester of HSUP, the vast majority of them as undergraduates. At the end of the first semester, a jury of experts from the university selected ten idea generators who were awarded scholarships to continue working on their entrepreneurial ideas in the second semester. The ELTE team leaders considered it important to build the professional network early, so they selected team members not only from their own institution but also from eight other universities, 64 ELTE students took an active role in teams from other universities and 19 completed the second semester individually.

The ELTE brainstormers focused, among other things, on sustainability, the use of artificial intelligence, and the development of community-building and entrepreneurship platforms. In addition to the mentoring support provided by the National Innovation Agency, ELTE supported the teams with a number of its own initiatives.

Five ELTE teams participated in the Introduction Day on June 15, which was the final event of the program. The Demo Day, organized in the framework of the student festival EFOTT in July, gave the best HSUP teams in the country the opportunity to present themselves to the innovation ecosystem, incubators and investors. This year, two ELTE teams – Cyclosec and Komposztfarm – were invited to the prestigious event, and the jury found both projects worthy of professional support, so the teams will soon be in contact with investors.

Cyclosec (brainchild of László Bucsai, ELTE Faculty of Informatics) is a GPS-enabled device that can be hidden in a bike and its app allows anyone to view the exact location of their bike at any time, as well as enjoy the app's other features.

The Komposztfarm project (brainchild of Mihály Herbák, ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences) aims to recycle food waste that is not suitable for human consumption.