Techstart Ventures LLP
November 2019 Edition
#SuccessStartsHere
Techstart Ventures LLP
#SuccessStartsHere
Welcome to the November Edition of the Techstart Newsletter. This month we are delighted to announce our new fund Techstart Ventures II! With new funds now launched in Northern Ireland and Scotland, in this edition we have a look at the basics of the venture capital business.
Latest News
From Portfolio Companies:
Cloudsmith, Stampede, Retinize, CattleEye, ChilliConnect, Neurovalens and more!
Contents:
The team at Techstart Ventures is delighted to announce the launch of Techstart’s second suite of Northern Ireland targeted funds – a £30m seed capital fund focused on investing in ambitious start-up and early stage technology businesses in Northern Ireland, and a complimentary £4.5m Proof of Concept grant fund focused on assisting entrepreneurs determine whether or not their innovative idea has commercial potential.
This launch builds on the achievements on the first Techstart suite of funds that has provided PoC grant support to 225 entrepreneurs and invested in 46 start-up and early stage companies in Northern Ireland, a number of which such as Neurovalens, Plotbox, Cloudsmith, Locum Match and BrainWaveBank are being recognised as the next crop of high achieving businesses in their market sectors.
This new fund brings the total funds under management by Techstart Ventures to £90m, across Northern Ireland and Scotland. We have also built out a great team of 12 people based in offices in Belfast and Edinburgh to deliver these high volume / value add investment manadates. As Techstart Ventures itself has reached critical mass as one of the most active regional focused investors of seed capital, and with a growing portfolio that will exceed 120 companies across Northern Ireland and Scotland in the coming 3-5 years, we are announcing two key programs that will underpin our post investment support for the founders of the companies in the techstart family.
Firstly, we are launching a community programme for the benefit of the founders in the portfolio companies both in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Every day our founders are dealing with the challenges of getting a business off the ground. The collective experience of the founders in a portfolio at scale is a massively valuable pool of resource and experience. We propose to use this talent and experience for the collective good by hosting regular meet ups in an ‘unconference’ style. We are delighted that our Chairman, Mark Dowds, will be leading this initiative. As an entrepreneur Mark has both managed and participated in equivalent programs in the US and Europe. Mark's involvement brings further energy and passion to our founder community.
Secondly, and in recognition of the scale and complexity of the broader seed extension and Series A marketplaces, we are launching our Series A program. This will be for the benefit of those portfolio companies whose future capital requirements are more significant and will involve raising capital from London/Dublin based investors. The program will have two broad components – assistance with communicating the opportunity effectively and secondly to assist with introductions to a relevant group of investors with whom we have built relationships specifically for this purpose. We have seen this challenge coming in the portfolio for some years and have been proactively socialising Techstart Ventures and its growing portfolio across a large section of the GB and Irish investment community. Building on the circa £42m of others people’s capital already in the Techstart portfolio, we believe that this is a vital aspect of our contribution to the development of our portfolio companies and we are already seeing some early signs of success with a number of our companies cracking the code of securing that larger next round investor – most recently Cloudsmith.
The new Northern Ireland seed fund’s investment sweet spot is £300k, with an ability to follow to up to £2m in any single company. We are happy investing at the pre-revenue stage and can also invest at the pre-product/idea stage too. We look for ambitious product focused tech entrepreneurs who believe they have the wherewithal to create something of significance from nothing, and who can convince others to join them in their mission. If this is you, please pop in for a coffee!
You may have heard the term Venture Capital being thrown around, but perhaps never fully understood the core concepts behind it. The goal of this post is to explain Venture Capital in simple terms and at a high level, to hopefully foster an understanding of the role Venture Capital plays in the startup ecosystem.
By: Samarth Desai
At its simplest level, Venture Capital (VC) is funding given to a startup in exchange for equity in the company. In this context, a startup can be defined as a relatively new company that is growing and in need of money to help sustain its growth, while equity is percent ownership of a company. An example of this exchange would be an investor giving $500,000 to a startup to help it grow in exchange for 10% equity stake in the startup — while the implications of this exchange seem abstract right now, we will get into the details of what it means for both startups and investors.
Now that we know what VC is, this begs the question: why does VC exist, and where did the demand for this unique form of funding come from? After all, for the majority of America’s business narrative, most funding for ventures has come through various forms of loans and other debt financing. While the origins of VC in the US is an entirely different discussion in its own right, more basically VC has grown in popularity over the last 50+ years as people began realising that traditional bank loans and debt financing make little sense in the realm of startups. From the banks’ perspective, the majority of startups have a high risk profile and ultimately fail, so it’s difficult to justify such a risky loan when there are much safer loans to make (and make interest off of). From the startups’ perspective, utilising loans or debt financing is disadvantageous since it is better to reinvest earnings to accelerate growth instead of losing earnings by paying back loans along with incremental interest. With the rise of these innovative, yet risky ventures in need of funding over the last 50 years, VC has stepped in quite adequately!
Fast forward to present day, and VC still satisfies the funding gap in ways that small business loans, crowdfunding, and in some cases government or nonprofit grants can’t. What sets the VC system of financing apart from these alternatives is that it does not disrupt a startup’s cash flow and oftentimes comes with mentorship. This combination of non-disruptive funding in exchange for equity and dedicated mentorship has created a good (but not perfect) mutual fit, and has ultimately enabled VC to play a large role in aiding modern technological innovation. In fact, the majority of the most impactful technology companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have been recipients of Venture Capital, and perhaps would not exist without the assistance of VC funding during their earliest stages.
Any misunderstanding about which types of companies receive VC funding is well justified — we most often only hear about Apples and Facebooks of the world being built out of garages and dorm rooms before their rise to power with the support of VC. While these make for great stories, they unfortunately also convey the perception that all VC-funded companies are extremely small and young companies with a high probability of failure. I don’t wish to deviate too much by engaging in the fine details of when a startup stops being a startup, but it is important to understand that companies that have grown beyond the point of being startups also seek extra capital.To put things into perspective, there are companies that range from $100,000 in revenue with 5 employees to $100 million in revenue with 500 employees that require VC funding to continue growing.
This acquisition of capital to aid growth tends to occur in installments known as venture rounds. Traditionally, these funding rounds progress from Pre-seed to Seed to Series A-F, and in between each round startups are expected to grow in market share, revenue, and product/service realization. To provide a sense of how each round differs monetarily, the Pre-seed round typically ranges from $200,000 to $500,000 in funding, the Seed round typically ranges from $1 million to $2 million, the Series A round typically ranges from $5 million to $15 million, and so on and so forth. A useful aside to note is that in the tech lexicon, startups are often defined by their most recent venture round. For example, a startup that finished raising its Series C venture round would often be referred to as a “Series C company.”
Now that we understand the full breadth of companies that seek VC funding, we can dive into the other side of the coin — the suppliers of the funding for startups (brace yourself for an avalanche of terminology!) When it is time for startups to raise money, they usually seek the financial assistance of Venture Capital funds. These funds consist of two primary actors, the Limited Partners (LPs) and General Partners (GPs). In this partnership, the LPs are generally such as university endowments, pension funds, insurance companies that provide the financing for the VC fund, while the GPs are the active investors who make the decisions on how to use the money provided by the LPs.
An important clarification to make is the difference between GPs and Venture Capitalists (VCs)— there are many types and levels of VCs, and in the pecking order GPs are the most powerful and influential ones. It should also be noted that these General Partners are generally industry veterans with business, research, and entrepreneurial experiences that make them very valuable to the companies they invest in. Thus, it is oftentimes the case that a GP who invests heavily in a startup will join its Board of Directors, and even if the GP doesn’t fill this capacity, he/she will also provide mentorship and guidance to the companies that receive investment.
Generally, VCs work together in Venture Capital firms with the GPs of the firm leading the way and having the final say on which investments to make. Similar to how startups try to raise several funds from VC firms, the VC firms will raise several funds throughout its lifetime. As an example, the fabled VC firm Greylock Partners raised its $1B Greylock Fund XV in October 2016. Since XV is 15 in roman numerals, this indicates that Greylock as a firm has raised 15 primary funds since its inception in 1965!
Typically, each fund raised by a VC firm will have a full life of ~10 years — this consists of the initial investment phase, the growth and follow-on investment phase, and the exit phase. The initial investment phase is when firms invest in completely new companies, which usually only consumes less than half of the total fund size. The rest of the funds are reserved for follow-on investments for the companies from this initial batch that survive and continue to grow successfully. Finally, in the last few years of the fund’s life, the VC firms will try to liquidate their investments and get their money out by helping their portfolio companies make an exit (which we will discuss at the end of the post). It is also important to note that new funds are raised by a VC firm every ~3 years, which means that a firm will typically have overlapping funds that are simultaneously active, but at different phases. So, even if a VC firm is done making new investments with one fund, they would have already raised another fund to make new investments with while the prior fund has moved on to the follow-on and growth phase. To make this easier to conceptualize, I made the following diagram to provide an overview of the VC fund timeline:
The goal of the GPs at a VC firm is to develop a profitable investment portfolio through each fund that it raises. The approach for building a successful VC portfolio is similar to the approach for building any other type of investment portfolio, in the sense that it similarly requires significant research, due diligence, and diversification. But, with so many unique and promising companies to potentially invest in, where do VC firms start?
To build the right portfolio of companies, each VC firm begins by building and maintaining a large funnel of companies to evaluate and keep relations with, which is known as the firm’s company pipeline. These initial pipelines are generally quite massive, and can range from hundreds to tens of thousands of companies depending on the size of the VC fund. However, VC firms have limited resources through their VC funds and are thus extremely selective with who they invest in — in fact, the typical VC firm will ultimately invest in less than 1% of the companies from the initial pipeline. The process of narrowing down this pipeline varies from firm-to-firm, but it generally involves close evaluation of companies through countless hours of networking and listening to pitches from entrepreneurs trying to sell their vision and business strategy in hopes of investment.
In exchange for all this work that goes into building a Venture Capital portfolio, VC firms generally receive their compensation by following the “two and twenty” fee structure that is prevalent in hedge funds. In this structure, the GPs of the VC firm take two percent of the total fund size as the management fee each year, while at the end of the fund life they keep 20% of the profit. So, in the case of the $1B Greylock Fund XV, each year the partners at Greylock are likely receiving 2% of the $1B fund size, which is $20MM! On top of that, at the end of Fund XV they will keep 20% of the profit, which is known as “carry” and can be quite a hefty sum if they made smart investments!
Ultimately, for all these different parties in the VC and startup ecosystem, the end goal is a mixture of making money and having the desired impact on the world. For everyone to make money, the startup which receives VC funding needs to be successful and make an exit. An exit is essentially the way for any company and its investors to cash out, and this can occur through two different avenues: Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) or an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
A merger, which is extremely rare for startups and is instead more common for more established companies, is when two or more companies decide to join together to form a single entity. A famous example of a merger was when the oil and gas giants Exxon and Mobil merged to form ExxonMobil, which we now see at gas stations around the country. An acquisition, on the other hand, entails a larger company completely buying out a smaller company. This tends to be a more common exit for startups compared to mergers, since many bigger corporations find that they can streamline what they are building by acquiring a leaner, more efficient startup that’s trying to tackle the same problem. Interestingly, many acquisitions fall under a process informally known as an acquihire, which occurs when a larger company acquires a smaller company primarily for the skillset of the people. This tends to happen when the larger company doesn’t have the efficiency, personnel, or domain expertise to tackle a certain problem on their own, so they create a talent influx by bringing in the people from the smaller company that they acquire. The last major method of exiting, the IPO, is essentially when a company begins selling shares to outside investors, which is when it becomes “public.” This process is a bit more nuanced and could really have its own dedicated post, so I’ll leave this video and article to explain how it works.
I hope this article proved to be a useful guide for understanding the basics of what Venture Capital is, who the players are, and how all the different pieces in VC fit together!
In one of the largest seed funding rounds generated by a Northern Ireland start-up , Belfast-based tech firm Cloudsmith has closed an equity investment round of £2.1m
The round was led by Frontline Ventures and co-investors MMC Ventures, and locally by Techstart Ventures through its Invest NI fund, Techstart.
Cloudsmith’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offers an advanced logistics platform for software developers, operators and vendors, who need to secure, manage and accelerate their product development and distribution. It distributes millions of artifacts on behalf of its global customer base spanning every time zone in almost every continent.
The seed round takes place after a pre-seed investment earlier in the year, and will be used to ramp-up Cloudsmith’s R&D and marketing capabilities, with a focus on bringing to market the world’s first universal artifact caching service – providing software developers with an isolation and edge caching layer that will add significant resilience and performance capabilities to modern software delivery.
“This investment is a clear vote of confidence in the Cloudsmith team and their ability to execute.”
Hal Wilson, Partner at Techstart Ventures
We believe that the concept of provenance will play a defining role in the future of software security and quality. All companies need end-to-end visibility and control of the assets in their software pipelines. It’s important to have the support of Frontline and MMC as we enter this critical stage in Cloudsmith’s growth,” said Alan Carson, CEO of Cloudsmith.
“Customer feedback has shown that a single cloud-based platform for managing software artifacts builds collaboration and communication between teams - a critical aspect of the DevOps culture we facilitate,” added Lee Skillen, CTO of Cloudsmith.
Steve Collins, Partner at Frontline Ventures said, “The guys are building what is in effect a foundational element for the next stage in the evolution of software development and distribution. Protecting developers and businesses from the chaos of public software will be a game changer. ”
Dan Bailey, Venture Capital Investor at MMC added “We were impressed by the depth of understanding that the team had about the developer tools market and believe in the importance of their software provenance vision. We are excited to be a part of it at such an early stage.”
Find out more about Cloudsmith:
Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog
Leith, UK, 12th November 2019 – Stampede launched today with £1m seed funding from investors including Techstart Ventures, Galvanise Capital and angel investor, Judy Wilson, as well as the Scottish Government. Previously known as BLACKBX, Stampede is a Leith-based start-up offering digital growth services. It provides offline businesses online tools to help them connect with customers and grow faster. This replaces wasteful physical promotions and advertising. The funding will allow Stampede to grow its team, expand its sales remit and continue developing its suite of services.
Stampede’s flagship product, a Wi-Fi based customer engagement and marketing analytics tool, is currently used by over 800 venues. The new funding will allow the company to expand in the UK and internationally. Stampede will be growing its team from 32 to 60 employees with the specific goal of contacting every pub, bar, restaurant, café, hotel and shop in the UK over the next 12 months – 530,000 businesses in total.
“Stampede is the best friend of every pub, restaurant and hotel owner,” said Stampede founder and CEO, Patrick Clover. “Our mission is to give small businesses the same tools as their online counterparts. This will provide a level of customer insight and marketing automation previously only available to large brands with large marketing budgets and complex digital tools. We are called Stampede because we want to grow customer numbers for our users fast, but this growth isn’t limited to our customers. Stampede is growing rapidly which is only going to be accelerated by this recent injection of funding.”
Stampede offers numerous services covering the entire customer sales cycle, letting customers mix and match from the following complimentary services:
In venue services: Stampede offers venues a secure, branded Wi-Fi login portal, so that customers can access online services without a painful registration process.Stampede also offers an Instagram-style “Stories” service which lets venues display short videos or landing pages of their latest promotions
direct to customers’ mobile devices when they arrive at the venue. This can be an additional new touchpoint with customers, or replace traditional paper fliers and posters entirely, letting venues instantly display new promotions without printing new materials and wasting paper.
Post visit services: Stampede offers a platform for venues to communicate with customers through automated email or SMS campaigns after their first visit. This can include free food/drinks on a customer’s birthday, special offers for regulars who have not been seen for a while, or simply notifications of relevant events and deals.
Attract and return services: Stampede enables food & drinks venues to improve their average review score and attract more new customers by prompting their most loyal customers to leave reviews within two hours of a visit. Furthermore, Stampede enables venues to track the results of their marketing campaigns, see when customers return, how long they stay and which offers they use. This lets them learn more about their business, understand which campaigns work best and adjust future outreach accordingly.
“Techstart only invests in the most ambitious tech start-ups and founders, a description that suits Stampede and Patrick well,” said Mark Hogarth, Partner at Techstart Ventures. “We were initially drawn to Stampede by the scale of Patrick’s vision and the company’s already impressive ability to deliver digital marketing capabilities to operators of physical venues. We’re excited to be part of this seed round and look forward to supporting Patrick and his team as they deliver the next stage of Stampede’s growth”.
“It's getting increasingly difficult for hospitality and retail businesses to compete for attention with online marketing,” said angel investor, Judy Wilson. “Stampede is a clever piece of software that uses the existing wifi system to engage with potential customers. In our view it is a game changer for offline businesses.”
Find out more about Stampede:
Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
Retinize Limited is one of Europe’s fastest-growing Immersive Media studios, best known for its world-class Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and immersive multi-screen experiences. Recent clients include BBC, National Geographic, Save the Children, BMW, Tourism NI and Seagate.
The TechStart investment will enable Retinize to focus on its immersive-tech-based R&D, while continuing to grow its successful Production Services business.
TechStart Investor, Ryan McAnlis said: "We are delighted to be able to support Retinize as it enters this exciting new phase. Most analysts agree that the immersive media sector is poised for exponential growth and the combined plans that Retinize has for production and research will position the company at the forefront of that expansion."
“We are excited to have TechStart on board as an investor - what impressed us most was the time they took to really understand and challenge our long-term goals and objectives. This investment will supercharge our growth trajectory and will allow us to embark on an ambitious programme of research”
Phil Morrow, Retinize CEO
Unity Technologies, creator of the world’s leading real-time 3D development platform, today announced the acquisition of Techstart portfolio company ChilliConnect. With the addition of ChilliConnect to Unity Technologies, developers will benefit from easier, better integrated access to live operations and backend game management services to build and manage connected games.
“Creating games on Unity is a great first step, but developer teams of all sizes are then faced with the challenge of managing and maintaining those games, which can be very complicated and costly,” said Luc Barthelet, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, Unity Technologies. “ChilliConnect is the connecting piece for Unity developers, providing the essential LiveOps and backend services needed to successfully operate a connected game. Having ChilliConnect onboard closes the loop for developers to create, operate and monetize their game with Unity and we’re very excited to have them as part of the team.”
ChilliConnect provides developers with cloud-based game services to enable backend operations at scale, allowing developers to add online game features and run LiveOps without needing to manage their own server infrastructure.
ChilliConnect’s services, and the offerings from Unity’s other recent acquisition deltaDNA, round out Unity’s full LiveOps solution for building and operating connected games.
"We were delighted that Unity recognised the achievements of Paul, Mike and the rest of the team at ChilliConnect with this acquisition. This was the first exit from our recently launched Scottish fund as well as being our first investment alongside London based Ascension Ventures."
Mark Hogarth, Techstart Ventures
With these acquisitions, developers can now access cost-effective, customizable live game solutions, regardless of individual needs.
“Much like Unity, we believe in democratizing game development and management regardless of studio size, engine technology or commercial aspirations. We want developers to have a choice,” said Paul Farley, Chief Executive Officer, ChilliConnect. “By joining Unity, we are enhancing that choice for so many more developers worldwide. Our services will remain engine agnostic, but we’re excited to provide Unity developers with an easier path to successful connected game operation.”
Unity exists to empower the success of the world’s creators with the most accessible and powerful real-time 3D development and monetization platform. Games and experiences made with Unity have reached more than 3 billion devices worldwide this year and were installed more than 34 billion times in the last 12 months.
Find out more about Chilli Connect:
Website
CattleEye is a video analytics company whose mission is to create the world’s first autonomous livestock monitoring platform, improving the lives of farmers and their livestock and revolutionising the Protein Supply Chain. It is a deep-learning, cloud-based, artificial intelligence platform, designed to interpret visual imagery of livestock from industry standard web cameras. It has the ability to autonomously identify the animals and extract insights including measuring gait, applying mobility scores and monitoring other cow welfare happiness and welfare indicators.
The company was founded in April 2019 by Terry Canning, who is from a dairy farm and has significant AgTech sectoral experience having previously founded FarmWizard, a cloud-based software as a service for Livestock in 2004 and then successfully selling it in 2015 to the Duke of Westminster's Wheatsheaf Group.
Co-founder Adam Askew was the Senior Architect for Philips Digital & Computational Pathology Life Sciences Division, he was responsible for the development and delivery of a deep learning powered application to automatically detect and quantify cancer in tissue samples.
“We are delighted to have secured this investment from TechStart which will give us the ability to rapidly grow our high tech team in Belfast to develop an application that will be a world’s first and has the potential to save the global dairy industry billions of pounds annually in increased efficiencies”
Terry Canning, CattleEye Founder
Find out more about CattleEye:
Website
San Diego, CA - November 12, 2019 – Neurovalens, a global HealthTech company focused on developing innovative neuroscience-powered products to improve lives, launched its Modius SLEEP campaign on Indiegogo this week and has already surpassed their $50,000 goal. The device follows the success of the Company’s first headset, Modius SLIM, which raised $2.5M on Indiegogo in 2017, gaining worldwide popularity with orders from 80+ countries around the world, and has continued to reach over a half million user sessions.
Modius SLEEP continues the Company’s mission to improve global health and wellness by providing drug-free, neurological solutions. For the duration of the campaign on Indiegogo, Modius SLEEP is available from $249 and will eventually retail for $499.
The campaign can be found here: https://igg.me/at/modiussleep
“After gathering feedback from thousands of SLIM users, we found that improved sleep was a welcomed bonus and this became our motivation for making changes to our technology to create Modius SLEEP,” said Jason McKeown, CEO and founder of Neurovalens. “Our new headset taps into the power of the brain’s hypothalamus, which influences many areas of the brain, including weight loss and sleep. Our aim is to help people avoid sedatives and sleeping pills as they only mask the problem and come with a host of nasty side effects. We use neuroscience to improve lives through safe, innovative products and we have complete confidence our SLEEP device is as life changing as our SLIM device continues to be.”
In an initial 30-day study, 95% of Modius SLEEP users improved their overall sleep score with 85% claiming that they were more satisfied with their sleep patterns. Additionally, 71.3% of survey respondents with sleep issues reported positive changes when using Modius SLEEP.
The Modius SLEEP headset is worn for 30 minutes before bed and does not have to be worn in bed. It works by sending a safe electrical pulse into the vestibular nerve that influences the areas of the hypothalamus and brain stem that control the user’s circadian rhythm and sleep patterns.
Find out more about Neurovalens:
Website | Twitter | YouTube | Instagram
The world’s first cordless 3-in-1 hair tool that combines a straightener, wand and tong.
WE ARE PARADOXX has just launched the world’s first cordless 3-in-1 SUPERNOVA hair tool that combines a straightener, wand and tong in one travel friendly tool. With the help of eleven specialist engineers across three local companies, Cmass, BigSmall and Sensoteq, WE ARE PARADOXX is launching SUPERNOVA globally.
The patent-pending design is the only tool ever to combine three separate hair stylers without the need for interchangeable, detachable barrels. In addition, the battery powered, USB charged design makes SUPERNOVA uniquely suitable for ‘styling on the go’.
SUPERNOVA has been designed to suit most hair types, with an optimum styling temperature of 185˚C and full length styling plates. It is lightweight, compact and cordless; making it ideal for popping in your handbag and styling on the go.
Such is the innovation that the brand already has orders for SUPERNOVA from some of the world’s leading retailers including Saks Fifth Avenue, Harvey Nichols, Next, Debenhams, Ulta and ASOS.com with global distributors desperate to get their hands on this true innovation in hair styling.
Find out more about We Are Paradoxx:
Website | Instagram
Earlier this week, Cycling Ireland and See.Sense announced a multi-year partnership intended to enhance the experience and safety of members of the cycling community and deliver exclusive benefits to Cycling Ireland members.
As part of this, See.Sense will become the official bicycle light supplier and official cycling data and insight supplier to Cycling Ireland.
“The data and the insights we’re sharing with Cycling Ireland are about enhancing the membership experience,” explains Irene McAleese, co-founder of See.Sense.“
"It’s going to get some insights into what are the popular routes across Ireland, in terms of which routes are people taking and which are the busiest.”
Cycling Ireland will gain access to the aggregated insights of cyclists who have opted-in to share their ride insights via the See.Sense app. This will give it access to never before seen insights on how and where all types of people ride.
See.Sense was amongst the winners of the first-ever TRANStech Awards, announced at a lunchtime ceremony at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London last Friday.
It was crowned winner of the Safety and Security Improvement category of the awards scheme
devised to recognise the use of technology to improve transport.
Winners of the new awards, sponsored by Karhoo WSP, Innovate UK and CoMoUK, were selected from over 130 entries and ranged from names like Ford, Mercedes-Benz and Uber to local authorities and new technology start-ups.
Awards director Darryl Murdoch said: “We launched the TRANStech Awards to acknowledge and reward the trailblazing companies delivering innovative mobility solutions and are delighted by its success.
Right Medicine drive digital innovation across Scotland
Locate a Locum have announced it has secured a multi year deal with right Medicine Pharmacy to help them continue their digital innovation by using the Locate a Locum Workforce Management Platform. This partnership will help Right Medicine Pharmacy continue their customer centric approach across their 28 pharmacy branches by investing to make staff processes easier. Locate a Locum is excited to partner with such a forward thinking pharmacy organisation.
Hannah Skinner, Business Development Manager at Locate a Locum, says “We are very excited to further cement our partnership with Right Medicine Pharmacy. Within the Healthcare industry Right Medicine are known as innovators and we feel that securing this deal represents a major win for Locate a Locum and sets us as market leaders in healthcare technology.”
"This deal is a testament to the hard work our development and operations staff have put in to create the best locum and staff workforce management platform available.”
Jonathon Clarke, CEO at Locate a Locum
Richard Stephenson, COO at Right Medicine Pharmacy is spearheading the roll out of the project that will include full workforce scheduling, payments and reporting. The system also ensures that Right Medicine meet their regulatory compliance needs.
“Our strong relationship with Locate a Locum made our decision to form a partnership with them an easy one. They listened to what we wanted and will deliver this. Making life easier for our teams and locum pharmacists is a big positive for any business and I am looking forward to the savings this will also bring.”
Find out more about Locate a Locum:
Website | Twitter | Youtube
Titan IC, the Belfast firm specialising in accelerated search technology, is celebrating after winning several major awards at the recent Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards. The company’s strong growth was acknowledged as ranking 28 out of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in Ireland and Titan IC also scooped both the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Cyber Security Award and the Innovative New Technology Award in association with Google.
Titan IC, the experts in accelerated search, today announced that its cutting-edge hardware Regular eXpression Processor (RXP), has been selected to accelerate complex searches and pattern detection of the Mellanox BlueField-2® I/O Processing Unit (IPU) that empowers the next generation of secure cloud SmartNIC and Controller solutions.
Titan IC RXP hardware search acceleration engine enables very high-speed search across a wide range of applications including security, cloud & database acceleration, Natural Language Processing (NLP), edge computing and computational storage.
For the cyber security market, the BlueField-2 with embedded RXP engine can accelerate IDS/IPS applications such as the newest Snort 3.0 (Snort++) software from Cisco, Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and network-based application recognition (NBAR) programs. As a tightly integrated part of BlueField-2, RXP enables better detection and blocking of malicious activities in real time to help prevent attacks from spreading further.
Edinburgh, Scotland – private company data platform, MarktoMarket, has built on the success of its recent £1.75 million funding round by building customer numbers to 56, representing a doubling in the 5 months since Techstart’s investment was secured. This growth has come from expanding the firm’s user base amongst the UK’s leading accountancy firms as well as securing customers in the private equity, law and wealth management markets.
Founded in 2017, MarktoMarket aims to be the provider of the most powerful dataset and search capabilities on UK private companies.
Its products give customers hitherto unavailable insights into valuations, M&A activity and industry trends. Capital is flowing into private markets at an unprecedented rate and MarktoMarket’s tools help customers identify, analyse and execute on opportunities
Co-founders Doug Lawson, Martin Clarke and Bertie Wilson said: “Techstart’s investment has been the catalyst for a step-change in the business. The capital provided by our new investors has allowed us to secure first-class software engineers, data analysts and business development professionals to execute on our exciting pipeline.”
Mark Hogarth of Techstart Ventures said: “MarktoMarket is becoming synonymous with gold-standard M&A valuation data for the accountancy and corporate finance market. It is using its position as a platform to build the team and launch new products to solve acute pain points for customers in existing and new markets.”
Find out more about MarktoMarket:
Website | LinkedIn
Pitchbooking, the scheduling and payments solution for sports facilities, have expanded their customer base here in Ireland recently, with St Columb's Grammar School Derry the latest customer to come onboard. The agreement will see the school use pitchbooking for their publicly rentable sports facilities, providing a genuine solution to the need to generate revenue to help with the operational costs of their facilities.
Shea O' Hagan, company founder at Pitchbooking stated: "We see that on an ever increasing basis, the education sector are being tasked with ensuring the facilities they provide to their students are self sustaining and commercially viable. This means that, they have to find processes to allow for revenue to be generated from the use of their pitches, halls and courts outside of school hours. We have worked with the team at St Columb's to bring their facilities onto our platform, making it easy for the to manage booking requests, recurring payments and usage reporting."
James Green, Head of Physical Education at St Columb's, added: "We chose Pitchbooking to help with the rental of our schools sports facilities. We were looking for a solution that meant I could easily manage the status of our bookings, let us take payment online and took away the time consuming admin that comes with facility rental. Pitchbooking ticked all of those boxes, plus, our customers love the new process, and they can book anytime, on any device."
Find out more about Pitchbooking:
Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
Our awareness campaign aims to educate dog owners on the harm that processed pet food can do and show them how switching to a raw diet can help their dogs live a longer, healthier and happier life.
Our manifesto:
We know what it’s like to really love a dog – so much you don’t know what life would be like without them. To see them as your own, even though you share more sofa than DNA.They are your wonderfully wordless, yet infinitely wise, sidekick. They are your family.
It’s why at Bella & Duke, we believe they deserve more. More than ‘vet-approved’, ‘nutritious foods that pay more lip-service than love and do more harm than good.Dogs deserve real, raw food. They deserve to thrive, not just survive and they deserve a pet food industry that puts their health and lives before profit. So, let’s take on the big dogs. Let’s guarantee a future where our pets can eat as nature intended. Where they can live the big, bold, waggly lives that they deserve.
Let’s do things differently… Let’s Declare Raw!
A decade of empathic technology knowledge deployed in a box to accelerate automotive innovation
Sensum, the empathic technology company, today launches the SynsisTM Empathic Technology Developer Kit, the world’s first sensor-fusion kit for measuring real-time human states from body, face and voice data combined. Synsis equips automotive OEMs, tier one suppliers and simulator companies with a single solution to research and rapidly prototype a new generation of personalised in-cabin solutions. After several years of engineering custom solutions for the automotive industry Sensum is now packaging its technology and algorithms for customers to purchase and operate. Synsis is designed to speed up research and development for products that can measure and respond to human feelings. This new wave of empathic technology promises enhancements in safety, comfort and services.
For digital technology to interact with humans in smarter and more personal ways it needs to understand how they are feeling. Human data measurement from in-cabin sensors can result in greater road safety by identifying driver distraction or the onset of fatigue.
Follow us to learn more about raising capital in Northern Ireland and Scotland.
Plus keep up to date with all the exciting news from our portfolio!
In Scotland, Techstart Ventures LLP manages the Scottish Growth Scheme – Techstart Ventures Equity Finance LP Fund which has been financed by support from the Scottish Government and the European Regional Development Fund from the 2014-20 European Structural Funds Programme in Scotland.
In Northern Ireland, Techstart Ventures LLP manages the Techstart initiative. This initiative is funded by Invest NI as part of its Access to Finance strategy and is part funded by ERDF under the EU Investment for Growth and Jobs Programme 2014-2020. TechStart Ventures LLP provides support for early stage technology businesses and university spin-outs through £50m of equity funds, and a £4.5m proof of concept grant fund.
