250 companies entered. Ingeborg won.

Saro Robotics came through 6AM’s tenth cohort. We wish Ingeborg, Daniel, Celine, Kristian and Oscar the best of luck.

Ingeborg Sofie Bogen is Norway’s best pitcher. She won the title at DNB NXT during Oslo Innovation Week, in front of a field of more than 250 companies.

“It’s completely unreal. Very, very fun. Extra fun to win against such good competitors,” she told Shifter straight off the stage.

What she had to get through

250 companies signed up. Three qualifying rounds cut that to four finalists: The Open Engine Company, Saro Robotics, Pentalys Energy and Novem. Each had three minutes on stage before the gong, then questions from the jury, which took around half an hour to decide.

The jury was made up of Andreas Slettvoll, Chooose founder, previous winner and now partner at Futurum Ventures, Victoria Somdalen, investment manager at Startuplab, and Sherington Amarapala, investor at Atomico.

Slettvoll, who has stood where she stood, said before the final that the bar has moved: “The standard is set much higher, and the companies move much faster. Companies that used to be two, three, four years old are now two, three, four months old.”

Sigmund S. Kielland of Pentalys Energy, one of the other finalists, was straightforward about it afterwards: “As a competitive person I always want to win, but it was a very deserved winner.”

The money goes into the robot

Saro Robotics builds climbing robots that inspect pipes in industry. They are looking for rust underneath the insulation, and the point is to stop sending people into dangerous working environments to find it.

From the stage, Bogen said the company has recently signed its first customer projects with two industrial players. The prize, a cheque for 300,000 kroner from DNB, goes into developing the product further.

“We’re in a really exciting phase where we have a lot of critical testing ahead of us,” she said.

Her advice

Asked for her best advice to anyone about to pitch, she pointed at practice, and at believing the message.

The most fun thing I know is talking to our customers. When they give me good quotes, I try to pass that on to the audience.

That is worth sitting with. The best pitch in Norway this year was not built out of slide design or stage craft. It was built out of customer conversations, repeated back faithfully.

The competition has been held at DNB NXT since 2015. The story was reported by Mia Sandnes Nilsen in Shifter.