Fifteen tech start-ups have raised £6.3 million in investment and grants after taking part in a new AI accelerator programme set up by the University of Edinburgh.
The accelerator ran for five months from February and sought to help AI startups with high-growth potential.
The final 15 companies were chosen from 89 applicants and include Sharktower, a project management software firm that recently raised £400,000 in seed funding, and Reath, a software firm that helps companies become more environmentally friendly.
Since enrolling on the accelerator, Reath has secured £313,000 in funding and signed up Marks & Spencer to a pilot scheme, helping the retailer to improve and track re-use of its packaging.
Another participant, MyWay, is a diabetes management app that uses AI to predict the efficacy of treatment, employs 30 people and recently raised £1.2 million in grant funding.
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Dr Deborah Wake, its co-founder and chief executive, said the programme helped her to refine the pitch skills needed for the grant application process. “We did an interview so pitching was an important part of that,” she said. “Being able to show you’ve been successful in getting on to programmes like the AI accelerator and the wider ecosystem that that offers is all incredibly helpful in terms of these applications.”
An expert in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes, Wake spent the majority of her career in frontline medicine and academia. Learning some of the commercial skills necessary to build her business was invaluable, she said. “Commercial delivery, managing a team, managing finances, these are all things that if you’re an employee in a big organisation aren’t really your problem and suddenly you’re the one having to deal with all that.”
Half a million patients and healthcare professionals have accessed information via the MyWay Diabetes portal, while 70,000 have downloaded the app. Operating a licencing model, it sells predominantly to NHS trusts, private healthcare companies and insurers that pay “a few pounds” per patient per year for access to resources.
Mark Sanders, chief executive and entrepreneur-in-residence at Scale Space, a workspace provider that supported the programme, said he saw “a real opportunity to help turbocharge scale-ups”.
“This country is really good at starting up businesses, we’re in the top three [countries] globally for start-ups, but we don’t make the top ten for businesses that make it through the scaling phase. That’s partly because it’s hard and partly because we’re not really organised to support these businesses,” he said.
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Sanders, who built a fintech business from 40 to 400 employees, said being able to tap into the expertise and contacts of a peer-to-peer network was one of the biggest benefits of being involved in the accelerator. “One of the things that it does is it takes away the time you need to invest in finding help. That gives you more time to focus on your business but also [a recommendation] means you diminish the risk of picking the wrong person.”
Robert Walker, co-founder of Data Innovation.AI, was another participant in the accelerator. His business helps companies reduce the spread of infectious diseases in buildings. He is presently courting potential investors who he met at the investor day hosted as part of the programme.
“We know now that these things take time. The accelerator was very good at setting a realistic expectation of how long it’s going to take to get some money and then baking that into our plan. It doesn’t just magically happen all at once,” Walker said.
The accelerator was funded by the Scottish Funding Council and the DDI Programme.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/venture-capitalists-provide-6-5bn-boost-tdlshr208
