Katapult-akseleratoren hadde overraskende mange søkere i den første runden. Denne gangen har det vært enda flere. Da Shifter snakket med «operating partner» Sean Percival rett før jul kunne han fortelle at kvaliteten også var høyere. Han viste til at Katapult-merkevaren er bedre kjent nå enn første gangen, og suksesshistorier som for eksempel klimastartupen Chooose har fått flere av de fremste selskapene til å søke.
— Det er ikke et mål i seg selv å ha flest mulig søknader. For det hjelper lite dersom selskapene er for ferske, sa Percival om det han beskriver som et luksusproblem da de skulle sette seg ned for «screene» seg frem til de beste.
Nå er screeningen over og valget gjort. Blant de 12 selskapene finner vi to velkjente startups i norsk sammenheng -- Diwala og Ducky. En av dem bare noen få måneder gammel, den andre som mer veteran å regne.
Annonse
Klimakonkurranse
Ducky har laget en plattform for klimatiltak, der brukerne kan se sine utslipp og få personlig tilpassede råd til hvordan de kan endre adferd for å redusere klimafotavtrykket. I Ducky Business eller Ducky School kan ansatte og elever konkurrere om å være mest klimavennlig innenfor en viss periode.
Teamet i klimatech-startupen Ducky. Foto: Ducky
Selskapet har 12 fulltidsansatte og har allerede begynt å tjene penger, med 135.000 Euro i omsetning i fjor. Ducky har hatt flere store kunder, deriblant Ikea, som har arrangert klimakonkurranser blant sine ansatte.
Annonse
Opp og frem
Diwala har vært gjennom en turboreise siden de startet opp i fjor vår. Selskapet ble til på et hackathon i Oslo hvor UN Women, Innovasjon Norge og Katapult Future Fest utfordret flere til å ta i bruk blockchain-teknologi på flyktningfeltet. Der deltok de blant annet sammen med Vipicash, som nylig hentet penger fra flere investorer. Diwala har brukt de siste månedene på å dykke dypt ned i temaet -- og har fått mye oppmerksomhet så langt.
Annonse
Sean Percival under Katapult Future Fest. Foto: Jan Khur, www.jankhur.com
Startupen har utviklet prototypen til en app som skal hjelpe flyktninger å få utdanningen sin verifisert, ved at man bruker blockchain for å sikre hver del av utdannelsen. I tillegg skal Diwala kunne tilby flyktninger å ta ny utdannelse, som registreres i appen og dermed vil være dokumentert for alltid.
Annonse
Ikke lett
Blant de 1500 selskapene er det 750 søkere, og 750 som Katapult selv har valgt å analysere.
-- Det har ikke vært noen lett oppgave, sier Percival.
Etter en første siling har de hatt korte intervjuer med mellom 150 og 200 selskaper. Percival har lang erfaring fra flere andre akseleratorer der han har vært mentor, og etter at han har gjort den første grovsorteringen, starter debatten.
-- Når det gjelder de norske søkerne, har vi altså sett en sterk forbedring i både kvalitet og hvor langt disse selskapene har kommet, sammenlignet med selskapene fra i fjor. Også i år har vi valgt ut to norske. Det betyr ikke at det bare var to gode norske kandidater. Vi er imidlertid et globalt program og vi gå rinn for å finne de beste impact-selskapene uansett hvor de er i verden. Så konkurransen er hard, sier Percival.
Stor spredning
Det er stor geografisk, og tematisk, spredning i utvalget. Dette er de andre selskapene som skal være med i denne runden av akseleratoren (på engelsk):
ConnectMed is leapfrogging traditional healthcare delivery by building a lightweight, distributed system in low and middle-income countries to provide affordable and convenient care missing in these markets. They do this through an in-pharmacy telehealth service that harnesses machine learning (ML) to utilise healthcare workers intelligently. Specifically, ConnectMed uses ML to predict what type of healthcare worker can appropriately handle a given patient case (triage/allocation) and to automate supervision and guidance of lower skilled healthcare workers (decision support/augmentation). Physical presence in the pharmacies is vital to gain patient trust, provide needed physical testing & examination, and overcome technology barriers. Health worker shortages have left a primary care gap in low and middle-income countries. Patients have to choose between care that is expensive, inconvenient or low quality. Private care is only affordable for the most affluent and public facilities are sparse and overcrowded, requiring long travel and wait times. Ad-hoc clinics have become common, but are staffed by low-skill health workers with no quality control. Because of this, many are left with no good options and regularly forego care.
Roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption every year, approximately 1.3 billion tonnes, gets wasted. A lot of it goes to waste before it even leaves the grocery stores and at Deligate they are aiming to change that. Deligate provides you with an effective routine for date controls and helps you identify the items that are in the risk zone of expiring. Reduce food waste and guarantee your costumers the best quality possible. Provides you with an effective routine for date controls and helps you identify the items that are in the risk zone of expiring. Deligate is more than anything an expression of awareness and responsibility when it comes to taking care of our planet and its resources. By reducing food wastage, Deligate believes that they can make this world a better and more sustainable place to live in. And this is what matters.
Adstuck is connecting the unconnected. More than 60 percent of the world’s population remains offline and 80 % of these disconnected live in India and South East Asian countries. Adstuck wants to get them connected and does this through the Adstuck platform. It is a crowdsourcing system, and the platform creates temporary organisations of online specialists allowing for completion of a large variety of tasks. Their main vision is to bring massive work on their platform by reshaping the way work is done. Adstuck plan to bring the disconnected to the platform, skill them for right jobs and build a massive pool of talent online. An example of a client of Adstuck is Amazon which provides Adstuck with numerous micro tasks that they need to have completed. Adstuck uploads these to their platform where their users can select and execute these tasks in exchange for access to the internet.
World Health Organisation has deemed mental health a pandemic of the 21st century due to increased stress amongst other things. FLOWVR helps solve today’s stress and productivity challenges by giving access to meditation’s benefits, regardless of where or when we choose. FLOWVR delivers personalised, interactive meditations via rich guided content, 360° videos and high impact VR technology. Self-guided, rapid immersion, tracking and progress/feedback controls enable their mobile solution to meet the unique needs of companies and individuals. FLOWVR provide highly adaptable stress management tools for people on the go. FLOWVR’s effects are immediate and breath taking.
Oizom is an Environmental Solution Company. Through strategic installations, Oizom develops a dense data-grid of networked instruments which helps us understand air pollution and climate change. The monitoring allows for spotting and resolving the sources of pollution. Oizom Big-data is the key to accurate forecasting & change analysis of environmental conditions. Oizom artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms identify unique patterns in ecological dynamics and provide accurate forecasting and predictions through machine learning.
RxAll is an AI pharmacy platform for pharma authentication, distribution and primary care through which patients and pharmacies in Africa order authenticated medicines and receive tele-pharma primary care. RxAll is an Internet and Big Data startup. Their platform uses a molecular sensor device & a cloud database of spectral signatures of medicines to carry out non-destructive product authentication before pharmacy order fulfilment. They are expanding their business in Africa- currently operational in Nigeria, Kenya and Singapore. Users will find RxAll's technology unique as it aims to assure the quality of medicines delivered to patients in growth countries.
SceneThere’s technology links 360 videos from different places together into a “real virtual world”, where you as a viewer can choose your point of view. SceneThere founders - and long-time friends - Marcus and Marcus built their first 3D world in 1998, but it’s not until the last two years – with the advent of VR – that they’ve been able to realise their vision around interaction and 360 films fully. Having helped worldleading research institute “Stockholm Resilience Centre” to use VR to boost empathy for life and challenges for the inhabitant in a Brazilian favela, their technology was shown in 2016 to top-level energy ministers at NY Times Energy for tomorrow as well as UN’s conference Habitat 3. SceneThere is making one of the most ground breaking technologies accessible to the masses by allowing anyone to create VRcontent for free on their platform.
SimbaPay is an award-winning mobile app transforming the international and pan-African remittance. With a focus on extreme speed, convenience and constant innovation. Customers are able to send money to loved ones or even merchants, from wherever they are at any time of day or night. The company is headquartered in London and is licensed and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Two-thirds of the energy consumption in various industries are thermal energy, which is produced with expensive and polluting fossil fuels. In the case of heat-intensive sectors, like food processing, for example, thermal energy can represent more than 70% of the overall production costs, squeezing their margins and their competitiveness. Industries looking for solar energy alternatives find that current technologies are only competitive at large scale (over 5MW), making them unviable for most industrial applications. Solatom’s unique approach: Solatom offers industries a viable alternative to traditional solar projects, producing pre-assembled modules which, connected, form a solar plant. These modules are transportable, and can, therefore, be entirely built in a factory, as opposed to traditional designs where the whole solar plant must be built on site. This approach takes advantage of in factory series production, cutting production costs by 65%. As a result, Solatom enables industries using fossil fuels, to cut their thermal energy costs by up to 37%, with less than three years payback.
State of Place (SOP) is an urban data analytics platform to help placemakers identify and economically justify urban design, planning, and development projects that create thriving places people enjoy. SOP collect about 280 on-the-ground features about the built environment - including the nuts and bolts of streets, like sidewalks, crosswalks, and street width, to the softer elements like facades, benches and trees which ultimately create the State of Place Index. The Index, which ranges from 0 to 100, is broken up into subindices that capture the urban design dimensions empirically to walkability and quality of place. The State of Place Index provides a quick snapshot of what is and what does not work on a block, set of blocks, or neighbourhood. Additionally, as the Index overall and the individual subindices are all linked to a predicted return on investment, it helps prioritize community needs based on stakeholders' economic development goals, their budgets, capacity, and the feasibility of the proposed interventions. Finally, as the community itself can be trained to collect the data, the State of Place decision-making framework can also serve as a platform for true public participation and facilitate community engagement.
