Where are Discovering Start-Ups winners now?
Find out more about Discovering Start-Ups 2018
ZifiSense
ZifiSense have had an extremely active twelve months since Discovering Start-Ups 2017 - unsurprisingly, given that at last year's competition they already listed China Mobile and Soho China (a huge real estate organisation) as customers. Their product, ZETA, has become the biggest low power wide area network (LPWAN) in license-free band in China.
The team has successfully broken into the hotel and agriculture industries. They worked with JW Marriot Shanghai Changfeng to upgrade the luxury hotel's management systems, integrating sensing, networking, visualising, learning and predicting capabilities onto a single platform for superfast identification and diagnostics of variety of facility issues. Meanwhile, IT Access and QTnet jointly announced that it will provide IoT solutions for agriculture and aquaculture solutions utilizing ZiFiSense’s ZETA network in Kyshu Japan.
Strong relationships have been developed internationally and ZifiSense have not been shy from taking a leadership position in the rollout of IoT. The ZETA Alliance (Japan) was formally established in Tokyo which brings together business leaders to accelerate the deployment of fast and effective IoT.
And amidst continued innovation (three new patents have been filed since last year's Discovering Start-Ups) the team still finds time to enter competitions, winning the Proptech Challenge at the AngelHack Shanghai HACKATHON 2018, a two-day software development competition organised by AngelHack and top real-estate management company - Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL).
Tangi0
Over the past year Tangi0 has rebranded to TG0 and the team is now ten strong and capable of providing end-to-end solutions from material formulation to signal processing, hardware, software, product development and manufacturing. With funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub, Amedeus Capital Partners and the Royal College of Arts, the start-up continues to develop its novel user interface, striving to replace electronic sensor complications with a waterproof, durable, single material interface that captures necessary inputs such as touch location, pressure and different forms of touch (twist, squeeze etc).
The team are targeting industries where intuitive user interfaces are necessary, for example automotive (door/window/seat/media entertainment) and home entertainment (TV/console controls). Because their production process does not require any parts assembly (unlike traditional button controls), they are able to manufacture their product faster and with less waste. It was predicted last year that $32Bn worth of touch related controls will be produced in 2018, of which 5/6 are waste products - for a simple finger swipe function, conventional manufacturing processes require 2 layers of a sensor electrode matrix and 1 layer of a pressure sensor. This process is not just a problem of cost and design, it is responsible for generating million tons of e-waste because interface panels are impossible to disassemble.
TG0 is collaborating with major brands in the consumer electronics and automotive spaces and continue to seek new partners. Contact [email protected] to discover how you might be able to incorporate this technology into your product or simply to request a demo.
Their team continues to grow! Currently TG0 are on the look-out for an Algorithmic Software Engineer, a Software/Machine Learning Engineer and an Intern Design Engineer. You can find out more about these opportunities here.
Undo Software
We've grown significantly since then, moving into a larger office in Cambridge to accommodate a bigger engineering team and opening an office in San Francisco to cater for the demand in the US market.
We've just completed our series B funding round, raising $14m. As ever, we're thankful to Cambridge Innovation Capital's support, our existing investor groups incl. Rockspring, Martlet, Sir Peter Michael, the Cambridge Angels group and Jaan Tallinn; and we are also pleased to see new investors coming on board such as Japanese venture capital fund Global Brain Corporation and Parkwalk Advisors Ltd which invests in innovative UK technology companies.
Laila Lotfi, VP of Marketing, Undo
Codeplay
Codeplay is an ambitious engineering organisation founded in 2002 that is internationally recognized for its expertise in heterogeneous systems. Their ComputeSuite product provides a standards-based software framework for developers to deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning applications across any silicon, and for these applications to run efficiently and performantly without fear of hardware limitations or silicon lock-in, while using the best part of the chip for the job. Previously, despite the huge demand for artificial intelligence in sectors such as automotive, the difficulties of getting performance from silicon, and of deploying across the multiple hardware vendors in a secure way, were hampering the impact that AI could have in vertical markets.
In September 2017, just before the Discovering Start-Ups Final, Renesas Electronics was announced as the first organisation to collaborate with Codeplay and deploy its open standard software framework for ADAS applications. Product updates continue with the latest, ComputeCpp CE 0.9.1, out on July 20. Codeplay are now an active member of the Khronos Group within its Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum. Furthermore, in April this year the company announced that Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund has committed £2.1M to grow its world-leading team with safety specialist engineers needed for safe and reliable artificial intelligence in automotive systems.