As anchor events, entrepreneurship competitions provide strong support to participants. Besides being a great way to unlock business potential and creativity, these types of competitions act as a great medium for finding opportunities to network, collaborate and grow.

In this two-part article, we will present some of last year' Cyprus Entrepreneurship Competition (CyEC) participating teams.

For our first part, we had the chance to talk to the CyEC 2021 finalist team Intellar Innovative Solutions, who won the second award of €6000 euros, to invest in their startup.

The two co - founders, Georgios Poullaides and Antonis Grecos, decided to quit their corporate jobs in the sphere of IT Advisory and Financial Planning, to pursue their dream of starting their own company. The mission and vision of the startup is to revolutionize the Motor Claims Management cycle of the insurance industry, leveraging technologies such as RPA and AI, to help streamline back-end processes, for optimum efficiency and cost reduction.

In this exclusive interview, Georgios and Antonis, shared with us the reason for entering last year' competition, which coincided with their decision to start the company, and were already looking for opportunities to help them grow. After seeing the advertisement for the CyEC 2021 and its benefits, they immediately realized that they should participate.

According to Intellar's founders, the best aspects of the acceleration program were the business consultations with leading experts and mentors, who helped them validate their idea and refine their business plan by challenging the team with valuable suggestions and constructive feedback, but also the meaningful relationships they created through the networking opportunities, that provided the basis for potential future collaboration with significant industry players.

For Georgios and Antonis, the whole CyEC 2021 experience was very helpful in getting in touch with the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, while their advice to the future participants of the competition is to be more open and flexible while developing their ideas, to test different hypothesis to determine optimum results, and to do it fast, so they can learn and progress further.

If you liked reading this, stay tuned for our upcoming article next week, when we will discuss with other participants on their CyEC journey and key takeaways.

To find more about Intellar Innovative Solutions visit: https://intellar.ai/

To experience the CyEC 2022 journey, register your team here: https://cyec.org.cy/