The judges at WeWork’s Creator Awards Berlin had a tough time deciding which of the five startups competing in the Business Venture category would go home with the top prize. All five delivered persuasive pitches explaining why their mission-driven companies deserved to win.
In the end, the judges split the difference, handing out prizes to three companies. Lucas Paes de Melo of Amparo, which makes affordable prosthetic devices available to amputees around the world, accepted the top prize of the night, taking home a whopping €318,000 (about $362,000). “With the funds from the Creators Award,” he told the crowd of 2,493 people, “we’ll get closer to our vision of building our clinics and increasing access to prosthetics in every corner of the planet.”
Beelinguapp, a language-learning app that garnered 1.5 million users in its first six months, received €158,000 (about $180,000). And the climate change crowdfunding platform Plan A walked away with €62,000 (about $70,000).
Held in a massive industrial building along the Spree River, the Creator Awards Berlin awarded a total of more than €600,000 ($685,000) in prize money. Since the Creator Awards was started in 2017, WeWork has given away millions in funding to more than 200 winners.
This is the second time the Creator Awards has been held in the German capital. The Berlin edition marks the eighth and final stop this year for the Creator Awards until the Global Finals, which will take place in Los Angeles in January.
After the crowd watched inspirational videos about the three Nonprofit finalists, host Adi Neumann announced that none of them would be going home empty-handed. The top prize of €60,000 ($68,000) went to Felix Hallwachs and Eva Brandt of the Little Sun Foundation, which delivers solar lamps to remote places with little or no electricity. When asked about what the funding will be used for, Hallwachs said that about 2,500 kids and 13,000 of their family members would receive access to the lamps, “making learning easier and their nights a little brighter.”
Two other nonprofit organizations, ShareTheMeal, an app that makes it easy to sponsor meals for children in need, and ZuBaKa, which helps refugee students in Germany, both took home €15,000 ($17,000).
In the lead-up to the awards ceremony, Meetup’s Togetherfest hosted a variety of sessions for people to connect to each other, including book swaps, portrait drawing, and even eye-contact experiments. The latter activity encouraged people to share one minute of eye contact with a stranger while sitting across from one another on comfortable pillows.
At the pop-up market and job fair that took place before the awards, attendees were treated to swag and face-to-face chats with companies that are hiring like Moo, Homify, and Airbnb.
The awards ceremony started off with a brass ensemble called the No Limit Street Band playing lively renditions of tunes like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” But it wasn’t until they played the nineties hit “Stop” by the Spice Girls that the audience really let loose.
The evening also ended with music as the Grammy award-winning artist Mark Ronson, a musician, DJ, and record producer for singers like Adele, Amy Winehouse, and Lady Gaga, spun a set. Not for the first time that evening, the crowd was on its feet.
