The Future Planet Awards returned to the Westminster stage of the Symposium yesterday with five nominees up for the 2019 prize in partnership with Global University Venturing, GCV’s sister publication.
The award aims to bolster the profile of first-class technological concepts with the potential to solve global challenges in one of five categories: climate change, education, health, security and sustainable growth.
Digital course textbook catalogue Bibliotech secured first prize, seeing off impressive pitches from fusion energy technology developer First Light Fusion, neurological stimulation device manufacturer Neurovalens Health, locational addressing protocol creator What3Words and genetically-engineered tropical crop breeding platform Tropic Biosciences.
Future Planet Awards is anchored by innovation platform and investment firm Future Planet Capital. Founded in 2015, it has invested more than $100m to date, profiting from partnerships with the most reputed academic innovation clusters, including the likes of Harvard University, University of Oxford and University of California, Berkeley.
Each year, the awards scrutinise the candidates through a quick-fire pitching contest, on this occasion judged by a panel made up of Patrick Chung, founding partner of Harvard spinout Xfund; Amanda Feldman, co-founder of impact consultancy Heliotropy; Ling Ge, internet company Tencent’s senior representative in Europe; Richard Dilworth of Norman Foster Foundation, and Douglas Hansen-Luke, chairman of Future Planet Capital.
Bibliotech, represented by its chief executive, ex-Rhodes Scholar and University of Oxford alumnus David Sherwood, runs a digital textbook library that gives students on-demand access to academic textbooks on their reading list in exchange for a monthly fee.
The crux of Bibliotech’s proposition lies in the scale of the academic study market, Sherwood said. He claimed Bibliotech is able to quickly source relevant content for students, which would appear particularly advantageous at the business-end of the curriculum, when time has become a scarce commodity.
Unlike film and music, academic textbooks are still to have been comprehensively digitalised, said Sherwood, who himself related to the problem through long days attempting to source texts for his course at Oxford.
Book prices have climbed as more students turn to the rental market, and Bibliotech has an early-mover advantage in that it licenses the content through the institution, rather than selling digitally to students under a business-to-consumer model.
GUV previously tracked Bibliotech’s $4m series A round, which was backed by University of Oxford Innovation Fund in June 2018. The funding was earmarked for recruitment to support Bibliotech’s ability to agree new partnerships with universities, with a focus on expansion in the US.