Seedstars World (SSW) will make its debut in Philippines on August 27th 2014 continuing on its journey to emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes.

Based  in  Geneva,  Switzerland  and  founded  by  Alisee  de  Tonnac  and Pierre-Alain Masson, the competition is supported by the venture builder Seedstars SA. After a first successful edition in 2013 across 20 cities, SSW expanded its competition massively to more than 30 countries. Regional winners are invited back to Geneva to pitch for an equity investment of up to USD 500,000 in  February, 2015. The regional events feature up to

20 startups who must prove their worth in six minutes of pitching time and withstand the questions from a local jury of experts, and a Seedstars World representative.

Alisee de Tonnac, SSW CEO, stated that “Seedstars World will hold its worldwide competition every year and we are expecting to grow exponentially to all the corners of the world and put all the fast growing startup scenes on the map! Indeed, our goal is to create THE network for quality entrepreneurs around the world and help entrepreneurs, accelerators/incubators,  co-working spaces and investors to interact with one another.”

Flitto,  an  innovative  crowdsourcing   translation  platform  from  South Korea won the first place for Seedstars World. Founder and CEO Simon Lee explains that “after Seedstars World came to Seoul, and crowned us Regional Winner, doors opened for us and we really gained traction. The publicity it created  was also fantastic and this [global] win will take us even further.”

This year, SSW will partner with IdeaSpace, whose Community Development Consultant Goldy Yancha states: “IdeaSpace is happy to collaborate with SSW as it brings more opportunities for tech startups in the Philippines and other emerging markets to gain access to a global platform. More so, SSW’s move to focus its lens to a city like Manila will bring forth more opportunities to spur local talent and create more solutions and ventures that will seek to improve economic productivity!”  At the regional level, Seedstars World is also partnering with  Galixo, a boutique consultancy based in Singapore working with startups in developing  their business strategy and entering new markets at global level. Galixo CEO Raphael Dana will also be part of the jury panel.

Further support will be provided by  Microsoft Philippines,  which is hosting the event.  DemoAsean, WebGeek.ph and  Pinoy Tech Blog are also partnering with SSW.

The  network  aims  to spread  the  Seedstars  spark,  which  accelerated  the  regional  winning  startups’ progress by tripling their funding on average during the first edition in 2013. This currently amounts to a total of 6 million USD of follow-up funding.