Vienna, the City of Music and Architecture, the city which breathes of culture will be soon starting breathing of technology and entrepreneurship and that thanks to the Pioneers Festival.

Pioneers Festival is an event for entrepreneurship and innovative future technologies which will be held on 30-31 of October 2013 at the Hofburg Imperial Palace, with an additional day (29 of October) at the House of Industry (investors day).

The festival has lined up speakers ranging up from Dave McClure (the guy is busy this end of the year in Europe, he being invited also at Startup AddVenture in Kiev later on) to Danielle Morrill (Mattermark), Eben Upton (Raspberry Pi), Phil Libin (Evernote), David Noel (SoundCloud), Seth Goldstein (Turntable.fm), Vishal Sharma (Google), Eric Migicovsky (Peeble), Patrick Collison (Stripe), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), and others.

As it happens usually at tech conferences, Pioneers Festival has also a Startup Competition section where hardware and software startups can apply for a chance to be selected and pitch in front of key players and investors.

This startup competition, Pioneers Challenge, has also lined up some experienced judges, among them being Tal Morgenstern (Sequoia Capital), Michael Treskow (Accel), Leo Batalov (Orrick), Lyuben Belov (LauncHub), Sean Seton-Rogers (PROfounders Capital).
Among all these judges there is also a Romanian one: Dan Lupu (Earlybird Venture Capital) who is a former student of University ‘Politehnica’, Bucharest and founding member of the Romanian Association of Financial Analysts (now CFA Romania).

If you want to get this chance to pitch in front of them then you need to apply no later than August 31.

If you get selected (only 50 startups will be) you will get to pitch to investors, international media, corporations, future customers, experts and mentors, receive two free tickets to the Festival (team of two), participate at the Investors Day and receive one full day of mentoring and pitch training for your startup.

Now, you do have to fullfill some conditions in order to apply:
– be a tech startup (software and hardware: web/mobile, health, space, AI, robotics, energy, etc)
– no older than three years
– raised less than €1 million in funding ($1,3 million dollars)

If your startup is a tech startup but it doesn’t fullfil the condition age and funding you can still pitch for 90 seconds in front of Pioneers Festival audience by registering to Pioneers 90″ Pitch. You will have more time to register for this as it ends by September 15.

And if you don’t want to do any of the above, you have one last alternative: Pioneers Showroom.
Here you can showcase your startup, product, service or prototype to the Pioneers crowd (investors, media, corporations, future customers and entrepreneurs) by having your own booth for a full day. The deadline is also September 15.

So, what are you waiting for? Apply and prepare yourself for the big days of 30-31 October!

Romanian Startups is a media partner of Pioneers Festival.
We hope that some Romanian startups will get on stage at this festival and, who knows, maybe get some awesome results! Or at least having some awesome time meeting new people.