Tag Archives: startup

News, Pets, South East

Ghost Fishing Nets – The Portsmouth-based brand making a real difference

British sustainable pet brand, Tangle, launched in 2022 with a mission to stop ghost fishing nets (fishing nets which have been discarded, lost, abandoned or dumped) from entering the precious marine environment. It’s estimated that 640,000 tonnes of ghost fishing nets end up in our oceans every year, accounting for nearly 50% of all plastics in the ocean. Born of the founders’ desire to make a real difference, Tangle’s range of premium dog products made from recycled fishing nets is expanding in 2023 and helps to prevent discarded fishing nets from entering the marine ecosystem and killing millions of turtles, dolphins, whales and other ocean life.

The Tangle Dog Lead – A strong, lightweight 4 ft dog lead made from discarded fishing nets featuring a padded brown cork handle and label, chrome plated clip and O-ring that allows for clipping the lead over your shoulder when your dog’s running free. The Tangle Dog Lead is durable, waterproof, chew proof and rinseable under the tap, available in two sizes 10mm for small and medium dogs and 12mm for larger dogs in Ocean Green online at www.tanglemission.com, RRP £39 including P&P.
Coming soon in 2023:
Tangle Dog Bowl, green marble-effect bowl made from recycled fishing nets, RRP £35
Tangle Throw Toy, strong, durable, lightweight and buoyant, RRP £14
Every Tangle product sold also supports Ghost Fishing UK, a charity dedicated to removing abandoned, lost and discarded fishing gear from UK waters.

Tangle Co-founder Sam Cartwright explains: “For 2023, we’re aiming to stop 526 tennis courts (137,800 sqm) worth of fishing nets becoming ghost nets. We’re all already aware of the impact of plastic bottles and straws, but in reality ghost nets make up nearly half of all ocean plastics and they’re far more deadly. By creating our beautifully-made dog products from recycled nets, we’re helping animal lovers save the oceans without compromising on quality, function or design.”

Co-founder Xavier Warburton adds: “We’re extremely proud of the products that we’re creating at Tangle, by creating a process where fishers are incentivised to donate their old nets, we’ve been able to stop ghost nets at their source and recycle them into something useful and beautiful. We want to continue to actively remove ghost net material from the oceans, recycling these into products, as well as educating communities about the ghost net problem and how they can help.”

Cybersecurity, News

SentinelOne launches S Ventures fund

$100M fund to advance enterprise cybersecurity and data innovation

SentinelOne, an autonomous cybersecurity platform company, has announced the launch of S Ventures, a $100 million fund to invest in the next generation of category-defining security and data companies.

“SentinelOne pioneered a data-driven approach to delivering autonomous cybersecurity. Our early days were defined by the support of our investors, who saw the power and promise of our vision. Today, I’m proud to see SentinelOne invest in future disruptors, doing our part to continue a legacy of innovation,” said Tomer Weingarten, CEO, SentinelOne. “Our focus on cybersecurity and data innovation brings SentinelOne’s technology and engineering expertise, go-to-market, and customer base to S Ventures portfolio companies. We’re committed to investing in innovation that solves mission-critical problems for the enterprise – and digital society at large.”

S Ventures will invest across all stages of the startup lifecycle with a focus on security and data companies that bring innovative use cases to the Singularity Marketplace, the company’s open application ecosystem allowing security teams to extend Singularity XDR use cases. New S Ventures investments include:

• Armorblox, a disruptive API-based email security platform that leverages machine learning and natural language processing to detect and prevent sophisticated threats.

• Noetic Cyber, the Continuous cyber asset management & controls platform that provides teams with unified visibility and actionable insights into the security posture of all assets across their cloud and on-premises systems.

“With the investment from S Ventures, and our integration with the Singularity XDR platform, detailed threat intelligence about email-based attacks and data exfiltration attempts that Armorblox stops can now be used to automate further investigation and response,” said DJ Sampath, Co-founder & CEO, Armorblox.
“Together with S Ventures and Singularity XDR, we’re empowering security teams with critical insights and asset intelligence to help them better manage their attack surface and reduce cyber risk,” said Paul Ayers, Co-founder & CEO, Noetic Cyber.

These investments join S Ventures portfolio companies Torq, a no-code security automation platform accelerating complex threat response workflows, and Laminar, a platform providing full data observability across the entire public cloud to reduce the attack surface and detect real-time data leaks.

In addition to providing strategic capital, SentinelOne will help foster innovation for portfolio companies by accelerating route-to-market and engineering scaling experience. Startups gain enhanced exposure in the Singularity Marketplace and SentinelOne technology ecosystem, and benefit from joint marketing and SentinelOne Partner Network opportunities.

“S Ventures is an extension of our commitment to innovation and our partner-first approach,” said Rob Salvagno, SVP, Corporate development & ventures, SentinelOne. “SentinelOne has forged its own journey from startup to hypergrowth, and we are now leveraging our experience to partner with the next generation of security and data companies that are charting their own paths today.”

Learn more about S Ventures, and read the blog “Investing in Tomorrow – Why We Started S Ventures.”

News

Health and Wellbeing Platform, WellGiving, Shortlisted for HealthTech 50

WellGiving, a platform designed to improve the wellbeing of employees through fitness and fundraising, has today announced its shortlisting in the annual HealthTech 50 rankings.

They are amongst a total of 108 shortlisted companies headquartered in the UK, celebrating the most innovative start-ups, scale-ups and established technology firms with a focus on original tech for personal and preventative healthcare.

The final HealthTech 50 ranking is due to be published on Monday 15th August, and will be decided through combination of reader votes and judging panel choices. Reader voting is already in progress, and closes 24th July, while the expert panel of judges include Avi Mehra MD, co-founder of Doctorpreneurs, Leontina Postelnicu, head of health and social care for techUK, and Jonathan Symcox, editor of BusinessCloud.

Speaking on the news of WellGiving’s shortlisting, creator and founder, Paul Rhodes, said: “We are thrilled to have been shortlisted for this year’s HealthTech 50, alongside so many other creative and innovative companies.

“We have worked incredibly hard to make the WellGiving platform a real solution for businesses who want to connect and engage their staff, improve the mental and physical wellbeing of their employees, and make positive impacts through corporate giving and their CSR strategies. Receiving recognition for the immense progress the WellGiving project has made in such a short time is beyond amazing!”

Developers of WellGiving, Green Gorilla Apps, are industry experts in the development of mobile and online platforms, and worked closely with Chief Executives, HR leaders and managers from corporations both large and small to create the platform.

Following a successful beta stage in 2021, WellGiving launched in January 2022 with the aim of creating a platform that would allow companies to improve the mental and physical wellbeing of their staff through the gamification of physical activity, while also giving businesses the chance to raise funds for charities that were hit hard during the pandemic. The platform is now on track to raise in excess of £1 million for charities across the UK and beyond.

For more information, visit:

https://wellgiving.co.uk/

https://businesscloud.co.uk/medtech-50-vote/

News, Tech

WCKD RZR and Collibra seal key technology partnership

WCKD RZR, the pioneering Data Enablement software startup, has forged a key technology partnership with leading Data Intelligence firm, Collibra.

The new agreement will provide customers of both businesses with a seamlessly integrated global data technology solution, accelerating data discovery and streamlining data mapping and cataloguing through machine learning.

WCKD RZR’s Data Enablement software, Data Watchdog, unlocks the potential of any multinational organisation’s data by allowing them to find, govern and access data in each country, in real time, fully compliant with relevant data sharing, privacy and governance rules.

The Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud is a single system of engagement that unifies data governance, data privacy, data catalogue, data lineage and data quality.

Chuck Teixeira, founder and CEO of WCKD RZR, said: “We are thrilled to be kicking off our new technology partnership with Collibra, which will double the benefits of data cataloguing and data enablement for existing and new customers around the world, particularly large global banks.

“Data Watchdog is now fully integrated with Collibra’s cataloguing and tagging features, and will enable multinational organisations to access all of their data wherever and whenever they want, fully compliant with the growing number of conflicting global rules. Our pioneering software will accelerate policy enforcement and governance through Collibra, while permitting access to data wherever it lives, in a datacentre or in the cloud.”

Global businesses often face a range of problems caused by conflicting data governance policies and authorisation controls in different locations and jurisdictions. If an organisation wants to fix its data estate by moving to a single, or multiple clouds or database management system, it can cost millions of dollars to do so. Often data is not labelled, properly catalogued, or can’t be found – and is subject to different regulations. These are all issues which WCKD RZR’s solution solves.

Stijn Christiaens, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Collibra, said: “We’re delighted to have WCKD RZR as a new partner. Their technology will bring a raft of additional benefits to our customers. Our partnership will enable new and existing customers to easily catalogue, find, govern and access all of their data using Collibra’s cataloguing and tagging features, now streamlined to work with WCKD RZR’s Data Watchdog solution.”

Data Watchdog will be available on the Collibra Marketplace.

The software is easily installed onto an organisation’s internal network allowing seamless access to your data. It begins to work within minutes, spidering and mapping all identified databases, using proprietary machine learning technology, auto-labelling the data so that it can be easily accessed by users.

Data Watchdog integrates with over 99% of database technologies such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, Google BigQuery, AWS Arena, MongoDB and many others.

Data Watchdog will help an organisation to understand their data estate, provide enterprise-wide policy enforcement via a unified set of data policies applied across all available databases.

Music, News

Founder of music platform Shodement on disrupting the music industry as we know it

Jay Lamusica, Founder of Shodement, the on-demand artist development platform, has come a long way since the inception of the business in 2012. Launching an AI-Powered app to boost independent artists’ careers, raising a $13m advance facility  for UK music creators or self-funding a sold-out festival in London with headline acts going double platinum-selling, are just a few examples behind the successful entrepreneur disrupting the music industry as we know it.

With global living experience of music, this Italian-born entrepreneur, with Nigerian roots and now a Londoner, understands music from the view of different perspectives and cultures. His idea for  Shodement was built in college after Jay’s friends were rejected by a local record label, leading him to the decision to build the label of the next generation instead himself.

The first years in business were an uphill battle with humble beginnings and many failed projects. However, after the initial hurdles, the business gained momentum and received its initial investment from Axial Capital Partners, after discovering Jay when he was producing shows for artists in London at the age of 19. Shortly after, Jay connected with Crowd Emotion’s CFO, Chris Wallis at a London Business conference, who offered him mentorship in business.

In the fifth year, the business reached its second breakthrough with the signing of Colombian star, Angelica Lopez who went on to win Lukas Awards Artist of the Year. This breakthrough led to Shodement building up its client base with projects for brands including Oxfam and Content Capital, launching festivals, discovering double platinum-selling records, and promoting artists around the world.

In 2020 everything changed for Shodement. The Covid-19 lockdown forced musicians to operate with teams on-demand and Jay was already an established music industry executive pioneering this trend already. The team took the decision to time this market shift with the launch of the technology division of the business and make their resources available to the whole music industry on demand.

The market shift was pioneered by Merck Mercuriadis, founder of Hipgnosis as one of the leaders in that area, and he was able to translate the potential of music content to the finance world. The technology was launched around the same time and thanks to music becoming a popular asset created by its artists, the value is now understood by leading private equity firms.

In the first 10 months of the app launch, the business attracted an M&A offer from a Global conglomerate, which Shodement later turned down in order to maintain customer focus.  “The reality is, I do think when you are part of a bigger organisation you tend to focus a bit less on the customers and it becomes more difficult to execute. From my view we are just getting started and we prefer to stay independent”, said Jay following the rejection of the offer.

In 2021, the business expanded the offering with a £10m ($13.5m) advance facility which came through thanks to the massive shift in the market and the boom of streaming. The concept is built around giving creators unlimited capital and teams on demand, so they can scale worldwide without losing ownership of the music rights. The Shodement team works closely with the artists and build them from zero to a “Music style IPO” to build Superstars of the next generation.

The company is now valued at over £3 million in 2022 with new investors confirmed to join their new financing round after scoring the fifth consecutive year with a breakthrough artist, making this 28-year-old Award-winning music executive one of the most promising music entrepreneurs in the industry. Shodement recently announced that the company is officially starting to sign new acts from this quarter, whilst the business continues its mission to build the future of the music industry and using its success to fund social responsibility projects like their youth-led yearly festivals such as Global 12, providing hundreds of jobs for young diverse creatives in London.

News, Sustainability

Tech Trailblazers Awards Mark #EarthDay2022 to Recognise Sustainability Enterprise Technology Startup Champions

Tech Trailblazers Awards recognise Sustainability Enterprise Technology Startup Champions around the World with relaunched Sustainability Trailblazers

LONDON, UK – April 22, 2022 – The Tech Trailblazers Awards welcome entries from enterprise IT startups that help companies or data centres save money while saving the planet. The Awards are open to entries from 27th June until 11.59pm PT on 31st August 2022.

The Sustainability Trailblazers category is open to all privately funded or VC backed (Series C or earlier) private companies under seven years old. It is open to product and services startups, based anywhere around the world, offering innovative tech solutions to enterprises.

Sustainable technology is a re-emerging category within the enterprise startup world that describes innovation that considers natural resources and fosters economic and social development. The goal is to drastically reduce environmental and ecological risks and to create a sustainable product. Buzzwords of what may be considered hot and innovative include the likes of: energy management, energy efficiency, carbon neutral, cost reduction, cost avoidance, net zero, energy, carbon, water, green IT, green ICT, application efficiency, software efficiency and holistic infrastructure management.

It is forecast that businesses will invest $877 billion in sustainability technology in 2022. That figure will continue to rise year on year. If you have developed technology in this field, all innovative products and services from companies that meet the criteria will be considered.

Rose Ross, founder and Chief Trailblazer of the awards commented: “Meeting the sustainability challenges of the future requires new thinking and that new way of looking at the problems we face is where many startups exhibit their superpowers. So, in recognition of these innovative technologies, as well as the importance of finding these solutions, we are resurrecting the Sustainability Trailblazers award.”

The judging panel includes leading figures in the IT industry from around the world, giving little-known and more known startups alike the opportunity to have their products and services reviewed by eminent influencers.

More information on the Awards, how to enter, newsletter subscription for updates and sponsorship opportunities, can be found at www.techtrailblazers.com or follow the Tech Trailblazers Awards on Twitter @techtrailblaze, #TTAwards or on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/company/tech-trailblazers-awards.

News

iKVA shortlisted for ‘Startup Tech Company of the Year’ by the National Technology Awards

iKVA, the Cambridge-based AI-enabled knowledge management software solutions company, has been shortlisted for this year’s National Technology Awards ‘Startup Tech Company of the Year’, in recognition of its pioneering data discovery technology which helps businesses to operate more efficiently.

Now in its sixth year, the National Technology Awards is the one of the most comprehensive celebrations of technology across a range of industries, and previous winners include globally recognised companies such as Blackberry, Vodafone and Virgin Atlantic. The Startup Tech Company of the Year category celebrates early-stage companies that are creating innovative new technology products or services.

iKVA was founded in 2017 out of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory and The Alan Turing Institute, and its core intellectual property is concentrated on AI knowledge management using multi-dimensional vector mapping techniques, applicable at enterprise scale. iKVA’s technology is designed for knowledge intensive, multinational firms and is already being successfully used by Mott MacDonald and The University of Cambridge. iKVA is backed by CEL, BGF and Crowdcube.

Jon Horden, CEO of iKVA, said: “It has been a tremendously exciting year for iKVA as we continue to expand our technical team and look to launch a new round of funding, so I am thrilled that iKVA has been shortlisted for Startup Tech Company of the Year. The unique way that iKVA collates and presents knowledge means it is scalable and adaptable to bolt-on to existing infrastructure and other software platforms, and being a chosen as a finalist in the National Technology Awards clearly demonstrates the potential of iKVA’s solutions for businesses.”

The award winners will be announced at a ceremony in May.

Business Advice, News

Top tips to drive financial inclusion and better cash management for SMEs

From the basics, to tops tips on how you can improve, here is everything you need to know about cash flow management for your small business.

Written by Ralph Rogge, CEO of Crezco

Cash is king! Cash is more valuable than profit, revenue, stock or receivables, and remains critical for any businesses. It’s an unavoidable necessity to pay for staff and suppliers and provides you with the necessary confidence to invest further in your businesses. Unfortunately, it is also one of the biggest challenges companies face. A recent survey by Capify found that a majority (52%) of UK small business owners are worried about their company’s cash flow over the next 12 months.

 

Three columns to cash

There are three key columns affecting cash flow: cash coming in (accounts receivable), cash going out (accounts payable), and access to cash (equity or debt raise). If your business is spending more than it makes, and does not have access to further liquidity, then things are going to dry up quickly.

Seemingly it should be straightforward to avoid cash flow issues. Like trying to lose weight, just assure you burn more calories than you intake: spend less than you make. Nonetheless, it isn’t that simple and so many great businesses with happy customers, especially smaller enterprises, suffer unnecessarily.  

 

Five cash flow management tips

There are easy steps that businesses can take to combat cash flow issues. Here are the five we consider important.

  1. Make getting paid easy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the propensity to be paid is inextricably linked to the convenience of payment. Inconvenient payment methods, such as cash and bank transfers, are subject to human inertia and human error. Few businesses hurry to pay their suppliers, but if you introduce friction to the payment process you will easily lose their attention as they look to address something less painful.

  2. Get real-time: You need to be accepting real-time payments. Everything in life has become instant, we’re impatient and we wait for nothing or nobody. I’m not sure about the moral or psychological implications here across sectors and products, but I remain confident that it is an unnecessary inefficiency for cooked meals and online shopping to arrive sooner to our doorsteps than payments do in our bank accounts. Some customers may still need to pay via card, say for retail point-of-sale businesses, which have slow settlement times, but otherwise you need to be implementing instant payments to have funds settle in real-time.

  3. Reconcile, reconcile, reconcile: A stitch in time saves nine. Stay on top of your outstanding invoices. This is easiest done when paid invoices reconcile automatically within your accounting software, companies like Xero and QuickBooks, as achieved by Crezco. This is the quickest and most efficient way to gauge your cash flow and potential problems. Without this you’re flying in the dark and suddenly things become a lot less clear. Furthermore, if paid invoices reconcile automatically, you’ll save a lot of time manually handling this process and life will be a lot more pleasant.

  4. Credit control: You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all the time. Some people are going to be slow to pay and you’re going to benefit from implementing a collection process. Either employ a credit controller, a collection agency or online credit control software, like Chaser, which will send out automatic payment reminders and help with the collection process.

  5. Cut costs: Eliminate all unnecessary costs and fees. It seems self-explanatory but undoubtedly there is room left to run things more efficiently. Find a company that can help you save around 2-3%, on all card-payments. For a company with low profit margins, say 5%, that’s a 40%/60% increase in profitability. Look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves.

More than anything else in their businesses, smart small-business owners recognise that staying on top of their cash flow is critical for the long-term health of their company. Do these things successfully, and your company will be able to survive and thrive even in times of financial instability. 

For more information, visit www.crezco.com

News

EdTech startup Vygo raises £1.5m supported by Angel Investment Network

Fast growing EdTech startup Vygo has raised £1.5m in a pre-seed funding round supported by Angel Investment Network, the world’s largest online angel investment platform. Vygo is a Saas platform reinventing the conventional social support ecosystem in higher education.

Offering personalised support services beyond the physical campus, the business already works with a third of Australian Universities and is rapidly growing in the UK. The raise will help it expand in the UK and Europe and fuel its ambition to build borderless social education for every student.

The round was led by Edtech VC Sparkminds and supported by Angel Investment Network. Other participants include Edtech accelerator Supercharger Ventures and the Australian Catholic University. The funds will be used for platform development and expansion of its UK and European presence.

The demand for Vygo has soared in the past few years as a result of the increased demand for HE institutions to extend their support services digitally. A recent JISC study estimates that up to 96% of university students require additional access to support during their undergraduate degree. This demonstrates the need for support services to be more accessible than ever to ensure that students are getting the best educational experience possible.

Ben Hallett, Vygo CEO & Co-Founder, comments: “At Vygo, we believe that every human deserves a world-class education and that social experience is at the core of impactful learning. The Vygo platform gives every learner a social education community filled with their peers, mentors, tutors, advisors and other supporters. With Vygo, education institutions are able to reinvent their social support ecosystem online and ultimately improve their student outcomes whilst scaling their impact. We were delighted to work with AIN to find amazing investors and individuals through a well-streamlined process.”

According to Sam Louis, Director, Angel Investment Network: “We’ve worked with some fantastic EdTech startups in recent years – Ben and the Vygo team are right up there with the best of them. Their focus on the social and pastoral side of education resonated with us right away and, combined with significant international traction, investors within our network from right across the globe felt the same. The need for this platform has only accelerated in the past few years with so much learning being done remotely and we’re delighted to have helped Vygo on their journey.”

News

Angel Investment Network reports fastest growth for five years in key barometer of recovery in start up investment outlook

Angel Investment Network (AIN), the world’s largest online angel investment platform, has announced significant annual growth, with annual revenues up 27% year on year. The figures underscore the extent to which global startup investment activity has bounced back impressively from the pandemic.

AIN connects startups with angel investors and now has more than 1.4 million users in total on the platform in 90 different countries. AIN has witnessed its fastest growth for five years as startups who had stalled investment rounds make up for lost time. The past twelve months have seen a record number of investor registrations, while connections between investors and startups have grown by 14% year on year.

There has been particularly impressive growth across Europe, with the UK seeing revenues increase 55%, Germany seeing a 37% increase in revenue and Scandinavia up 34%. Meanwhile The USA has also seen a rise of 24%.

Alongside the online platform, AIN also runs a successful broking division, which has been involved in several significant raises in the past 12 months for a variety of businesses. This includes cleantech company eleXsys Energy, personal money app Ziglu, mountain bike company Atherton Bikes and ecommerce marketplace aisle 3.

Building out its proposition, AIN recently announced the launch of its Private Equity and Venture Capital division, AIV Capital. AIV Capital will invest between $10-$75Mn into established businesses ranging from Growth/Series B to pre-IPO.

According to AIN founder Mike Lebus: “2021 has been our most successful year ever as the global startup ecosystem emerges strongly from a really challenging time. Both startups and investors are keen to make up for lost time on the back of stalled investment journeys and we have seen an impressive rise in connections as startups find the right investors to propel their businesses forward. It is so encouraging to see the growth of passionate angel investors willing to support early-stage businesses and strengthen the ecosystem.”

He continues: “We’ve also been pleased to announce the next stage of our evolution with AIV Capital. We are now able to support businesses right through the fundraising cycle, from the initial idea to seed funding right through to pre-IPO.”