135,000 ideas. Cephalo made the top ten.

Cephalo came through 6AM’s ninth cohort. We wish Ailin, Karianne and the whole team the best of luck.

Cephalo pitched on stage at the Red Bull Basement World Final in San Francisco, as Norway’s entry among the ten ideas selected worldwide.

The numbers behind that are worth spelling out. Red Bull Basement took over 135,000 applications from more than 40 countries this year. Ten made it to the final, where they pitched to global judges, industry experts and venture capitalists. Cephalo was the one from Norway.

The problem they put in front of the judges

Cephalo is building a sharing platform where teachers can exchange and adapt teaching resources instead of building everything from scratch.

The team spoke to more than 600 educators in Norway and abroad, and found that teachers typically spend over 25 hours a week outside working hours recreating material someone else has already made. That is a second full working week, spent reinventing.

Founder Ailin Østerås put it this way on stage:

We work closely with teachers to ensure that we create something of real value, giving time back to what’s important: education and students.

She was one of them

The reason the pitch lands is that Ailin is not describing a market she read about. She is a teacher herself, building this alongside her studies at NTNU, and those 25 hours were her own before they were a statistic.

That is also why she is on our front page under “Every founder starts somewhere”. Before: elementary school teacher. Now: co-founder and CEO, pitching in San Francisco.

Red Bull wrote up all ten finalists here.