News

Another year - and another great group of winners

The three winners of the 2017 Cambridge Wireless Discovering Startups event are Tangi0, Codeplay and ZifiSense.

Tangi0 impressed the judges with its flexible touch-sensitive material, which aims to revolutionise the way people interact with devices. It’s a pressed material particularly suitable for car dashboards, and it replaces complicated electronic sensors with a single, flexible touch-sensitive material.

Ilan Olivarez Correa from Tangi0 told CWJ that he was “honoured just to have been asked to take part in Discovering Startups and delighted to have won”.

Codeplay deploys skills learned in chip design and games development to create a platform for Artificial Intelligence development. One of the prime applications for this is automotive autonomy and Codeplay has licenced its ComputeAorta tools to Renesas for use on Renesas R-Car system-on-chips (SoCs). The framework will be available first on R-Car H3 as a proof of concept, then other R-Car SoCs for advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving.

The Codeplay platform provides developers with standard software development tools and support for a wide range of open source computer vision or open source deep learning software, such as Google’s TensorFlow. Developers can reuse their initial software assets or take advantage of the latest innovations in computer vision and cognitive processing, minimize porting effort and accelerate time-to-market.

Codeplay is already working with Google to ensure smooth working of TensorFlow with its products. The kilted Codeplay VP of Marketing, Charles Macfarlane, told us:

Codeplay is proud to be recognised among the winners of CW’s Discovering Startups Competition. Connecting AI to Silicon with ComputeSuite, Codeplay’s products take advantage of widely adopted open standards to make machine learning more accessible to application programmers.

ZiFiSense is a fast-growing Cambridge-based IoT technology provider using the ZETA LPWAN technology. It provides complete end-to-end IoT solutions for industrial customers and it has built the largest license-free LPWAN in China.

ZiFiSense has developed three categories of solutions: smart city, smart lighting and smart community. Its customers include mobile operators, government agencies, system integrators and large numbers of small to medium size enterprises.

The 26 strong judging panel chose the winners from nine finalists, with each making a five minute pitch plus questions and answers.

Past winners of Discovering Startups have found the contacts and kudos from the award to be fantastically helpful in their success. You can read more about the 2012 winner, Skin Analytics, on page 14.

The three winners walked away with a delegate pass for the 2018 Cambridge Wireless International Conference, Free CW Founder Membership for one year and a place in the finals of the £70K Wayra Acceleration programme. Wayra UK’s start-ups have raised more than $150 million and have done more than $10 million in deals. The winners will also receive six months of access to Allia’s Serious Impact incubator.

Destined for greatness: Representatives for Tangi0, Codeplay and ZiFiSense pose alongside the CW team at Deloitte's New Street Square offices in London for DSU 2017.

This article was originally published in the CW Journal: Volume One, Issue Two.

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