In celebration of «Oslo Innovation Week,» Daxap was invited by Connect to share our journey from being a startup to the company we are today at their event «Grow your startup – Get smart capital – Go international.»
CEO and founder Kubilay Kartal shared som views on how this journey has taken form, with backup from the brilliant people working in @connect.
«Our journey began with the development of our flagship application, Kiddy. Today, Kiddy offers automatic translation in 16(sixteen) languages and serves as a SaaS tool for institutions, parents and children everywhere.
Our participation in the Impact Startup accelerator program helped us to structure our social impact. We were also granted market clarification grant in this period from Innovation Norway. Impact Startup led to a collaboration with Søndre Nordstrand, and Kiddy is now used in 21official kindergartens.
We were in a search for investment and published an announcemnet on LinkedIn as we are looking for a cofounder. This led us to Anders, now our board chairman, and Simen, our marketing head.
Recognizing our limited knowledge of the Norwegian market, we partnered with Proneo for business development support. We also collaborated with Sintef to measure our social impact, and they published a positive report on Kiddy. During this period, we met Anne Morkemo, who invited us to Springbrett. By the end of 2022, Ferd recognized us as on of the candidate to Years Social Entrepreneurship Awards.
To finance our projects, we begun to sell IT service to social entrepreneurs. And Kiddy made its first international sale in the Netherlands.
We developed Vibori, an app to facilitate communication between municipalities and the public. Just yesterday, we learned that Melhus municipality want to use our Vibori-app. We’re also partnering with OsloMet on a project about AI usage in preschools. After a year of hard work, Daxap received ISO certification. Kiddy began operations in a kindergarten in Germany, and we’re currently working with the Connect Internationalization program to expand Kiddy internationally
The first motivation behind Daxap was my personal experience as an immigrant. I aimed to address the challenges I faced by creating digital solutions that would have a positive impact on society. Today, Daxap stands strong with six employees in Norway and 20(twenty) consultants from all over Europe, all dedicated to developing digital solutions with a social impact.
Advisory board from the field in Norway
We try to get more women in team this year.
Our association with Connect has been fruitful. We’ve collaborated on three occasions: Springboard, Entrepreneur’s Day, and the Internationalization program. Each has contributed positively to our journey.
I’d like to touch upon SpringBoard briefly. In this event, we engaged with five experts in a two-hour session on B2B/B2G sales and Marketing.
We gained insights on the importance of reflection in entrepreneurship, learned about marketing and sales experiences, understood challenges like GDPR and certification, and acquired a fresh perspective.
From Springbrett, we took away four key lessons:
Avoid repeating known challenges.
Focus on the most key aspects of subjects.
Understand the solutions.
The value of networking.
Thank you for your time, and I look forward to our continued collaboration.»