The inaugural Global Corporate Venturing Tech Scout Challenge sees 15 finallists who will meet more than 40 corporate venturing units with at least an aggregate $5bn of venture assets under management.
The companies were reviewed using the American Security Challenge’s tech match platform and covers a range of technologies, including IT, clean-tech, financial services and social media.
The finallists (see below) will all meet entrepreneurs with the audience on the day selecting the most investable company and best presentation.
Morning: British challengers
2K Manufacturing Ltd
2K is a pioneering, venture capital-backed manufacturing company that has developed and industrialised a new technology to allow it to convert low-grade waste plastic into products. The company is now mass-producing EcoSheet – a sustainable replacement to plywood made from 100% low-grade waste – which is now being used by many major contruction companies.
DADapp
DADapp brings in two major innovations for two large opportunity markets. The introduction of three-dimension private sharing with a life catalogue, used for both consumers and the small and medium-sized enterprise market. The technical innovations are based upon 20 years military internet experience – the founder Julian Ranger, built a military internet business which he sold to Lockheed Martin, and is also behind start-up SocialSafe. Three of DADapp’s principals come from this business. Gordon Bell, the noted senior Microsoft researcher, stated in Oct 2011: "He [Ranger] is definitely on the right track with his vision AND service AND several years ahead of where our company needs to be."
DCisions
DCisions puts data at the customer’s fingertips. The combination of the high quality data with advanced benchmarking capabilities enables customers to make smarter investments with confidence in a simple and accessible way. Having compiled a database of more than one million current UK investors, DCisions indexes consumer portfolios to uncover what level of returns are being produced by different risk strategies – as a matter of fact rather than opinion. Regardless of the consumer’s knowledge, DCisions’ data should be the first port-of-call for the industry and all investors.
Flooved
Flooved is a fast-growth, globally scalable electronic publishing technology business with very low customer acquisition costs. Flooved is the world’s first online-only textbook platform providing university students with access to their entire academic content for a monthly subscription. Flooved is built and is being tested in-house and has has 12 publishers signed up so far, including Bloomsbury.
HipSnip
HipSnip is a personal shopping application that gets shoppers product advice from experts. Shoppers ask a question on a HipSnip-powered site, which is sent to the best people to give advice from the expert community. The unique sales point: HipSnip is a federated application that can be embedded into any website (i.e. embedded as easily as a blog). Key clients are retailers and publishers. Retailers’ staff can give online advice directly to consumers. Publishers gain a social shopping channel for their readers, with inbuilt monetisation via affiliate revenue. HipSnip is a free consumer-facing product with business-to-business revenues.
Mesaplexx
Mesaplexx, an innovative start-up company specialising in developing products and intellectual property in electromagnetic engineering and high performance filters, launched its xCube technology at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. This revolutionary radio filter technology has the capability to radically improve the performance of active antennas (AASs), enabling increases in network capacity of up to 65%. AASs are capable of significantly increasing base station site efficiency and performance. XCube delivers 50% more power output for the same input.
SocialSafe
SocialSafe is your aggregated social timeline – for when today becomes yesterday. SocialSafe is an application for PC/Mac that downloads all of your social network data (Facebook including Facebook Pages, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Instagram and others coming soon) and allows you to view the aggregated sum through a calendar interface, and provides full search, export and other viewing capabilities. SocialSafe works for consumers and also for businesses who have a more regulatory and analytics focus. The founder, Julian Ranger, built a military internet business which he sold to Lockheed Martin and has also founded start-up DADapp.
UVuu.Me
UVuu.Me has developed the first video-capture and editing service to produce professionally finished films from footage captured using Smartphones. The sophisticated Smartphone App allows multiple attendees of an event to capture and automatically upload time-synchronised footage to our servers for subsequent processing into professionally edited finished products. The application can be used to capture video and photo footage at any type of event, involving multiple locations where desired. UVuu.Me creates lasting memories of special times for people to share and enjoy and does it quickly.
Ventive
Ventive is a new approach to ventilation that recovers the heat from outgoing stale air to the incoming fresh air. The device works by capturing the wind and through the principle of natural buoyancy is totally passive – it has no moving parts to breakdown and requires no energy to run. It is also designed to be retrofitted to buildings, which gives a large immediate market. Ventive combines the simplicity of the passive stack with the heat recovery performance of a powered mechanical device without the cost, maintenance and energy penalty. The device is manufactured using high volume techniques.
Afternoon: international challengers:
Agincourt Solutions
Agincourt Solutions is a small business that provides cutting-edge technology and tailored analysis to governments and large multinational corporations. Our multilingual analytic toolset allows users to crawl the internet or other large data sets and harvest information in more than 250 languages. Agincourt’s technology affords users the ability to perform for cross-lingual search and data management. Our solutions employ advanced mathematics to discover new entities, shifting meanings, and trending topics.
AirPatrol
AirPatrol is the first and only security company whose technology can continuously monitor any mobile device on cellular and Wi-Fi channels in an enterprise, determine compliance with security policy, enforce the appropriate policy on the device in real time and dynamically empower the device’s capabilities for the situation regardless of who the user might be. AirPatrol offers a comprehensive suite of location-based management solutions that enable clients in the government, financial sectors and others to keep pace with the expanding security requirements of an increasingly mobile world.
CarryQuote
CarryQuote has been providing high-end, private label mobile applications to the financial services and market data industry since 2007. The company pioneered the concept of on-demand real-time global market quotes and was the first to offer custom branded mobile apps for secure research and multimedia content delivery. CarryQuote mobile solutions can integrate proprietary content with CNBC news, low-cost real-time market data, analytics and charting. CarryQuote’s unique SaaS-based technology is compatible with all major mobile platforms, ensuring access to critical financial information.
HyLighter
HyLighter provides software for collaboration involving documents. It offers the first-in-class distributed sensemaking system for deeply engaging groups of almost any size with a single document or large collections to help generate new knowledge, enhance decision making, accelerate learning, and provide an accumulating source of rich analytics. HyLighter makes the thinking of users that is ordinarily hidden, become transparent and easily accessible as a layer of annotation distributed across multiple documents and stored in a continuously updated relational database.
RedOwl Analytics
RedOwl Analytics is a software company focused on big data analytics in commercial markets. The core approach is to combine cutting edge inferential statistical techniques and powerful visualizations with open source, big data frameworks to create a powerful relational event analysis tool. RedOwl’s key targeted markets include financial services, legal, compliance, consulting, and business operations.
Unveillance
Unveillance has developed the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) botnet intelligence platform. Leveraging completely passive monitoring, without the use of any on premises hardware, software or agent install, Unveillance’s platform is able to assess whether an organization, country and/or government’s network is actively compromised by malware and thus participating in a botnet infrastructure at a 100% zero false positive rate. The intelligence platform is able to provide alerting and metrics on severity, frequency and scope of infection as well as display successful remediation efforts.