Bristol-based Buildersite have won funding through Seedcamp, a new project/fund targeted at young entrepreneurs in Europe, designed to help tackle some of the challenges of building globally competitive technology businesses.

An intensive week long event was held in September in London, Seedcamp is targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA and has been set up to provide seed funding, mentoring and networks for startups.

268 companies applied and 20 teams took part in an intensive week-long event in London in September and Buildersite was one of six teams to secure €50K for a 10% stake. Buildersite is designed to be a web-marketplace for construction services, providing homeowners and tradesmen with a trusted venue for transacting business. The domestic construction market in the UK is worth £10bn. Competitor sites tend to be about lead generation but Buildersite instead charges a success fee which is 5% of the project fee. This means the whole service can be free to the homeowner, and it can track bad builders and bar them from the system. Buildersite launched in mid-2006 and now has 3,000 tradesmen on the site.

Seedcamp is targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA and has been set up to provide seed funding, mentoring and networks for startups. The other winning teams come from all over Europe and represent innovative ideas that have the potential to grow into big businesses: RentMineOnline (The Netherlands), TableFinder (Sweden), Zemanta (Slovenia), Kublax (UK), and Project Playfair (Scotland). More info at Mike Butcher’s TechCrunch post on each of the companies and why they were chosen.