Meet the companies from our Earliest Stage Startup Showcase
We’ve just held our second startup showcase where 15 of our brilliant early stage companies from across our portfolio took to the stage pitching to almost 100 of Europe’s leading angel investors and seed VCs.
Let me quickly remind you what Founders Factory is all about: We are a corporate backed accelerator and incubator. Some of the world’s most forward thinking corporates have invested in Founders Factory; L’Oreal (Beauty / Retail Tech), Holtzbrinck Macmillan (EdTech), Guardian Media Group (MediaTech), Aviva (InsurTech / FinTech), easyJet (Travel) and China’s CSC Group (AI). Together with our corporate partners, we are building and scaling 200+ companies within 5 years.
There are two parts to what we do:
1. Accelerator: Exciting early stage businesses join us for six months and receive intense, bespoke support from our full time operations team (tech experts with vast experience) as well as access to our corporates with a view to achieve an unfair competitive advantage for our portfolio companies.
2. Incubator: Together with our corporate backers we identify problems that need to be solved across their industries. We build prototypes, test and validate ideas through our creative concepting team. Those that make the cut are built, a founding team is hired and they are ‘spun out’ with funding from the Factory.
Kicking off the day, Brent Hoberman, our exec-chairman and co-founder, explained the ‘unfair advantage’ our startups receive, linking the day to ‘licensed insider trading’ — since we know big things are coming for these companies via either investor interest or deals in the pipeline with our corporate partners.
Read on to get to know our startups a little better…
Built from scratch in our Incubator:
Entale, reimagining podcasting, presented by Wil Harris, CEO & Co-Founder. Entale is upgrading podcasting for 2017 and beyond. Through adding proprietary levels of rich media and metadata to audio, Entale allows content creators to tell more engaging stories, and give listeners a compelling new way to hear them.
Frisbee, a continuous HR feedback platform, presented by Anna Brailsford, CEO & Founder (previously MD at Lynda.com). Frisbee’s vision is to transform performance management, offering enterprises real-time insight into the health of their entire workforce.
Taptrip, a flight booking tool presented by Kassem Younis, Product Manager. Booking flights is a painful process — 70% of people start their search on mobile but only 10% actually book on their phones. TapTrip fixes this problem with the power of natural language processing and an AI powered calendar integration.
Oncare, presented by Alistair Cohen, CEO & Founder; OnCare makes care easier with technology. By replacing paper-based processes with software, they are modernising the social care sector and making care more transparent, personal, and efficient.
ShortSupply, a teachers recruitment platform, presented by Duncan Verry, CEO & Founder. Providing a flexible and lucrative way to be a supply teacher whilst helping combat the growing teacher shortage. Short Supply is a platform that connects schools and teachers that automates the process of recruiting and managing supply teachers.
Finmo, a financial marketplace for SMEs, presented by Hadi Laasi, Product Manager. Finmo upgrades the bank accounts of sole-traders, simplifying their financial lives by helping them to track receipts, classify transactions, estimate taxes, get insurance and financing, all in one simple mobile app.
And now for our Accelerator startups — these are the existing early stage businesses with initial traction, a great team and ace product:
Skylabs Analytics, an AI satellite imagery, presented by André Tavares, CEO & Founder. Skylabs uses satellite data to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. By combining artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning to Earth observation datasets they uncover high-level abstractions that provide actionable insights.
GyanaAI, an AI powered data marketplace, presented by Joyeeta Das, CEO & Founder. State-of-the-art AI that reveals what real world factors drive your sales and marketing data. An advanced data-sciences browser based Saas platform designed to provide deep insights from geo-located data that requires no training to use.
Riviter, an AI powered insights platform for brands, presented by Andi Hadisutjipto, CEO & Co-Founder. Riviter’s visual search automatically finds, identifies, and attributes objects in images to specific products, people, and trends. Its proprietary deep learning for computer vision was independently tested to be the most accurate and fastest on the market, without requiring human intervention in search.
IIlumr, AI enterprise analytics application, presented by Jason Lee, Founder & CEO. illumr helps organisations better understand and predict patterns of behaviour that affect them. It is a deep-tech data analytics application using a proprietary methodology based on complex self-organising systems.
Shepherd, IoT facilities management, presented by Will Brocklebank, CEO & Founder. Shepherd monitors the machinery that facilities managers and maintenance teams are contracted to support. They use machine learning to check for faults on these critical assets 24/7. If their anomaly detection system spots that a sensor is no longer operating normally they provide detailed alerts with diagnostic analysis directly to responders. This can save businesses from costly outages.
Previse, Trade Finance 2.0, presented by Zartasha Naeem, Head of Business Development. Previse uses artificial intelligence to give multinationals the tools and incentives to have their suppliers paid instantly on receipt of invoice and without requiring process changes. Flipping the standard model of supply chain finance on its head.
Psious, VR for mental health, presented by Xavier Palomer, CEO & Founder. Psious is a Barcelona-based company that develops virtual reality technology applied to mental health. Simulating real scenarios through VR and other immersive resources (augmented reality, 360 videos) in order to provide patients and users with total immersion into the situations they need to face or cope with.
Teacher Gaming, educational games platform for Teachers, presented by Mikael Uusi-mäkelä, COO & Co-Founder. Built by the team behind Minecraft, TeacherGaming Desk is a one-click solution for game-based learning, designed to make video games a viable teaching tool for every classroom.
Fundamental VR, flight simulators for surgery, presented by Richard Vincent, CEO & Founder. Fundamental VR Delivers ‘flight simulators for surgery’. Combining cutting edge virtual and mixed reality with haptic feedback to create a near real operating experiences. In doing so creating a safe, measurable and repeatable involvement with surgical procedures. A unique and scalable way to educate surgeons anywhere in the world.
We don’t bring in startups in ‘cohorts’ or ‘class of 2017’ — we bring them in at the time that makes sense for them strategically, so this means we’ll be profiling many more soon. We’ll keep you posted.
Check out our full portfolio here. If you want to know more or apply for the programme, say hello to hello@foundersfactory.com
