At the pitching competition in SHIFT 2016, 18 startups participated and 5 made their way to the final, and Bomberbot was the winner. Here, we interviewed with Cristian Bello, CEO & Founder of Bomberbot to get to know the benefits his company got out of pitching at SHIFT.

Bomberbot is a group of 7 team mates who launched the startup in 2014 with the aim of serving mainly schools. They developed a tool that is able to teach programming in primary schools. Bomberbot empowers teachers to teach programming at primary schools as children practice the theory playing a game with other children. Bomberbot’s product provides teachers (with no knowledge of programming) with all the tools to be able to teach programming in primary schools.

“Education with technology will make impact in millions of people in the coming years and this combination can actually help us create a better world,” says Cristian Bello, CEO & Co-founder of Bomberbot.

Bello believes that his team has a good product that is engaging users and customers and makes a big difference in the way of teaching at primary schools. Having a competitive product and also practicing pitching were the factors that helped Bomberbot find their way to the top 5 of all the pitching competitors. Bomberbot grew rapidly in 2016 (from 6.500 users to 75.000). Bello claims that winning the pitching competition helped them have more exposure in Finland and expand their mentor/investor network.

In the end, Bello’s advice for young entrepreneurs is that “Being an entrepreneur is super fun. It’s both exciting and challenging and I believe that if people are encouraged to become an entrepreneur, they should really follow their passion as the journey will be hard but if you’re following your passion, it will be worthy.”

Text by Shohreh Hosseinzadeh