Zario outcompetes 1300 candidates to win €160’000

The EU-Startups Summit 2023 brought together more than 2000 people in Barcelona for two days of networking, inspiration and learning. A highlight of the event is the Pitch Competition, for which 1300 startups from across Europe applied. The jury nominated 15 startups to pitch in front of the audience. One startup stood out: Zario from Switzerland.

Founded in 2021, Zario is solving a pressing challenge: digital addiction, with at least 430 million phone users self-identifying as being addicted. The cofounders Ondrej Zak and Killian Fjellbakk have built a digital well-being platform and the first global app designed to help people live more digitally balanced lives. The app uses the latest psychology research to create engaging challenges in the real world to help reduce and replace unhealthy screen time consumption. Downloading the free app is the first step to changing digital habits.

Since its launch in March last year, the app has recorded over 20’000 downloads and 1000 monthly active users. According to the startup, this number has been growing significantly since the launch of the new app. The majority of the users stem from the United States and India. "Our goal is to become one of the top 3 apps for screentime reduction on Android and to launch a re-done iOS app”, says Ondrej Zak.

“The award comes just in time with the release of the newest feature of our Android app that we have been working on for the last few months and where we are seeing an amazing retention increase. The Circuit Breaker - Zario’s newest feature helps you break the dopamine loop and reduce subconscious phone habits by opening a decision screen before launching distracting apps. We are also raising an angel round that will help us validate the business model and raise a seed round by the end of the year”, says Ondrej.

By winning the competition, Zario won a prize package worth €160k. This includes a €50k investment proposal by APX, Europe’s leading earliest-stage VC and a €50k funding opportunity with Look AI Ventures after due diligence. In-kind prizes include €36k of Scaleway cloud credits, €9.9k in credits for an explainer video maker account of simpleshow, 1 year of Pipedrive (Sales CRM), €3k in credits for the cloud communications platform Vonage. The winner will also get a 3-year EU-Startups CLUB membership and a 1-year Guru Plan for SEMrush worth €2.2k. The latter gives the winner access to their SEO and online visibility management SaaS platform.

Discussions with the investment committees for the investment are currently ongoing. The prize and funding will enable the Zario team to scale their vision and advance the solution. The startup is based in Lugano, Ticino at the Technopolo co-working space of the Agire Foundation.

(RAN)
Photo: Killian Fjellbakk (left) and Ondrej Zak (right)