From cashierless stores to AI-powered smart shopping carts, the future of retail is being reinvented every day. After all the hardships and difficulties retailers faced during Covid-19, brick and mortar businesses seem to be back on the rise. But to keep the momentum going, there is an urgent need for technological upgrades. 

Over the past 3 years, we have been partnering up with MediaMarkt for the MediaMarkt Startup Challenge to pave the way for retailtech and revolutionize the retail landscape. 

Are you ready to shape the future of #retailtech with the MediaMarkt Startup Challenge?

In the program, startups are selected to pitch their ideas for a jury consisting of MediaMarkt executives, investors, the Hackquarters team, and professionals from the retail industry. Last year, alongside MediaMarkt Global executives, guests from Google, Hürriyet, and The Entrepreneurship Foundation were also among the jury.  

Hoping to grow and scale even further with this year’s challenge, together with MediaMarkt we continue to bring entrepreneurs together with potential corporate clients and partners. If you are a retailtech startup specializing in Retail Sales Technologies, Post-Sales Technologies and Digital Transformation Processes apply to the challenge today!  

The MediaMarkt Startup Challenge provides countless opportunities to retailtech startups in various verticals along with the opportunity to pilot their products in MediaMarkt stores in Turkey and Europe. Also, the top three selected startups will have a chance to participate in Plug and Play’s Retailtech Hub acceleration program in Munich. The program in Munich offers corporate partnerships and access to the entrepreneur network of Plug and Play including the most active investors in Silicon Valley. 

As we prepare for this year’s challenge, we wanted to look back at highlights from the previous years.

2018

In the first year of the MediaMarkt Startup Challenge, 11 startups were selected to present their ideas at the Chain Stores Association Conference along with a PoC opportunity with MediaMarkt and Tekzen. The winners were;

BuyBuddy (first place), a retailtech startup producing smart tags for physical stores; 

Udentify (second place), a business intelligence solution aiming to create better solutions for manmade market research techniques by using face recognition and body tracking; 

Pacer (third place), a multi-award-winning new generation social learning platform built to manage and maximize corporate learning engagement. 

2019

In 2019, the three winners from the 11 selected startups were; 

Bagaj (first place), a locker service that can be used via a mobile phone app; 

Poltio (second place), which helps brands access, engage with, and learn from their users with the help of interactive content;  

Pegneon (third place), a serious games company specialized in educational video games for employee training. Between 2018-19, 165+ startup applications were received from various verticals including retail sales tech, corporate digitization process, and post-sales tech.

2020

Last year, we strived to turn the pandemic into an opportunity and received more than 150 applications from 39 different countries. 11 startups were chosen to pitch their ideas to the jury and the 3 startups that got the chance to partner with MediaMarkt in 2020 were;

Shopi, a SaaS-based, all-in-one omnichannel retail store operations platform with an order management system in place; 

Yosh.AI, a deep tech company that automates the communication between enterprises and users with AI voice text assistants; 

B2Metric, an AI-native predictive analytics solution that automates the machine learning pipeline for the company’s customer journey, price, and purchase optimization problem.