woola is a startup that aims to make a 20% year on year profit, but also wants to make the world a better place by reducing plastic waste - they want to replace the plastic bubble wrap used in e-commerce shipping with cushioned packaging made of sheared sheep's wool, which otherwise would simply be discarded. They estimate that simply conquering 10% of the Estonian bubble wrap market they could eliminate 64 kilometers of the bubble wrap used in packaging.
“Woola made the best pitch and has potential to make the most impact on the planet if they can deliver this product at scale,” said TechChill Board Member Andris K. Berzins.
Other contenders for the top prize included game-based marketing campaign creator Adact (Estonia), AI-powered online lawyer marketplace HUGO.legal (Estonia), biomedical data sharing platform Longeneze (Latvia) and real estate crowdfunding aggregator EVOestate (Estonia). Adact, Hugo.legal and VeritaCell received a total of 100 000 euros in soft commitment from the LatBAN Latvian Business Angel Network.
In addition to the cash prize woola will also get a fast-track to the Startup World Cup finals in San Francisco in April 2020, as well as receive 10 000 US dollars worth of Amazon Web Services credits.