8 Global Startups Who Have Used The Lockdown To Get S**t Done
Eight early-stage startups demoing their products span seven countries and six continents including Australia, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, UK & USA.
TechHub’s monthly demo night in London has gone remote and international and is better for it. Now, the organisers can not only showcase innovation from an impressive array of sectors, including fashion, fitness, energy and business, but they can handpick a truly global line up. That said, as lockdown eases in London, who knows if it’ll be returning to a physical event in July?
Until then, let’s make the most of getting a sneak peek of the new ideas coming into fruition around the world.
Intelistyle
As the pandemic forced fashion stores worldwide to close, London-based startup Intelistyle are using AI to recreate high-end in-store retail experiences online.
Their Deep Learning tech trawls the web for trends and uses Machine Learning to provide shoppers with stylist advice. And the results are impressive. At London Fashion Week, their AI stylist outperformed real-world stylists, with 70% of customers preferring the outfits ensemble by the algorithm.
Already working with some of the biggest luxury brands in the world, including D&G and Max Mara, Founder and CEO Kostas Koukoravas says retailers also increase their basket size by 42%.
Asked whether they are automating human stylists out of a job, Koukoravas said:
“Not at all. We are scaling the job of the stylist. Stylists traditionally are high-value and therefore ordinarily available to the very wealthy. Intelistyle is making that high end knowledge accessible”.
SHYFT
Nigeria is set to become the third most populous country in the world by 2050, and with leaky and undependable energy infrastructure, as the country needs urgent attention to support such rapid growth.
That’s where SHYFT CEO and Co-Founder Ugwen Eneyo comes in.
Her engineering PhD out of Stanford University has produced a patent-pending, plug-and-play energy management solution that supports solar and renewable energy. Eneyo says:
“Nigeria’s energy grid demands people rely on 60 million gas or diesel generators. We’re going to disrupt $14 billion industry”.
Operating out of California and Lagos, Shyft launched in October 2019 and is on track to hit a $1 million revenue in their first year.
Hubbec
Colombian serial entrepreneur and Hubbec CEO, Andrés Ramírez, asks:
“How many forms have you filled out online in the last 10 years and how much time have you spent doing it?”
The answer is unanimous: “too many and too long”.
Asides the hours (or is it days?) lost, the other issue is the security of our data. Who knows who purchases our data after we make everyday transactions?
Hubbec’s tech is a welcome addition, then. Not dissimilar to federated logins this is a specific B2B product that allows for safe storage and sharing of confidential information at the touch of a button.
Ahera Fitness
Ahera is a new wearable for gym-goers that measures reps and motivates the user through sessions.
Building out of Hong Kong, Co-Founder & CEO Rudy Bottin explained they had been working with scores of personal trainers and their clients to build the perfect product. Initially, Ahera was designed as a wearable watch, but early user feedback indicated that some weightlifters wear supportive straps on their wrists, so they made the product magnetic instead, allowing it to detach from the wrist to also sit on the weight being lifted. Smart.
Wearable tech has never taken off as much as most of us predicted, so it’s good to see new innovations coming out of this, what I feel is, a nascent space.
Findpet
Who would have thought the solution to the 10 million cats and dogs that get lost every year in the USA would be computer vision and machine learning?
That’s what Findpet are proposing, with facial recognition software that has 90% accuracy amongst cats and dogs. All users have to do is upload a headshot photo of their lost pet and it will automatically search across all the rescue shelters in the US and, hopefully, find your lost pooch or pussy.
When asked what other pets their technology would also be supporting, CEO Dan Krashokov, said “Cockatoos”.
Which I thought was rather lovely.
BD Waste
According to Founder/CEO, Emmanuel Danso, 80% of waste in Africa remains uncollected, but they are making grounds in his native Ghana by connecting businesses with recyclers through their mobile app. So far they have collected and recycled 120 tonnes of waste and are already looking to expand into Senegal.
For those wondering, BD stands for “Borla Daakye” in the Ghanaian dialect of Twi, and literally means “future rubbish”.
Ava Systems
The aftermath of COVID:19 will see the closure of a lot of big businesses.
But says, Andrew Quinn, CEO of Ava Systems, we can reduce insolvency by deploying his dashboard SAAS to allow business leaders to quickly see the health of their sites at a glance and make business-critical decisions in an instant.
Based out of Sydney but operating globally, this video is a decent explainer.
Bot Friends
Bot Friends are not a competitor to the deluge of chatbot applications being built, but a platform where they can all talk together. They only launched in March 202 and currently support Google’s Dialogflow, with more integrations including Rasa (open source) and IBM coming soon.
COO Michelle Skodowski opted for a brave live demonstration of her tech and pulled it off. Based in Germany, they are bootstrapped and looking for investment opportunities.
Global Startups Get S**t Done
Spanning six continents this roster illustrates the extent of innovation happening in the midst of a global pandemic.
Tectonic CEO and startup expert Nana Parry enjoyed the event and said:
“As a Ghanian-Londoner, it was excellent to see important tech being built out of West Africa, but also super interesting to see news businesses from Hong Kong, Australia and Colombia. I’m a big believer in understanding the exact needs of customers so congrats Ahera for adapting their tech following early-adopter feedback”.
Well done TechHub for curating such a global line up of startups.
You can watch the whole event here.
