On Thursday 26th October, we welcomed a record 6 exciting startups to pitch before our angel investors. The investor panel consisted of Sanjay Soni from South African-based Jozi Angels, Xavier Ballester – from the Angel Investment Network and Andrew Coupe – Business Development Manager, Impulse4Women.
First up was AI-powered interior decoration platform SuperDwell, headed by Tom Puukko who talked about the complications and barriers for average people when it comes to interior decor with the average expert costing $5,000 which is out of reach for many.
Making decisions on shades of paint and costly furniture can put a lot of pressure on individuals and this is where SuperDwell comes in, by suggesting furniture and design schemes. Tom was asked by investors what makes SuperDwell different from competitors, he stated that it’s the only service of their kind that actually offers expertise and personalisation as opposed to relying on generic suggested styles.
Next up was Sylwia Fitch, founder of Delux, a blockchain-powered service which authenticates goods by capturing provenance traceability ownership for luxury items such as wine and whisky, designer clothes and perfumes.
Headed up by a team of women, the startup hopes to combat the $1.4 trillion of fake items on the market by providing a reliable and traceable system for designer goods. Already in talks with many luxury brands, Delux is proving that it has a viable proposition.
Joel Hodgson was there from Trubrics, the first-user analytics platform for large language models. LLMs are used at a much larger scale than traditional machine learning or AI models and it’s hard to identify bugs and user preferences and prompts without user analytics. Secondly, LLMs are completely subjective so it’s completely up to the user whether the output was valuable or not.
Since launching the MVP in July, the startup has gained 350 users and is growing at an average week on week rate of 12%. When asked about the company’s business model, Joel talked about the plans for a freemium model in the first year aimed at SMEs in order to gain a regular user base and traction.
Andre de Wet from Flood introduced his super-app which is a mobile-specific white-label commerce platform that effectively allows businesses with large communities bring added value to their customers and at the same time allows brick-and-mortar retailers access to a new customer base. Super-apps are already working well in Asian and African markets, and Flood already has a proven track record in the Maldives with 28% of the country using the service everyday.
Crypraise was co-founded by Athil Gafoor, it’s a new type of crowd-funding platform which aims to eliminate scam fundraises and create accountability for startups when funding. Crypraise relies on Web3 by using an escrow system which gives more control to the investor backers.
With an average crowdfunder investment of $38, Athil hopes that this value will increase once backers have more confidence in the accountability of the companies they choose to invest in. Athil was asked about the development stage of the product which is currently in closed beta testing mode and also onboarding creators ready for the platform to go live.
And finally founder Oumesh Sauba from My T, an AI-enhanced bookkeeping platform shared his proposition with the investors. Much existing accounting software deals with data extraction and bookkeeping separately. MyT is one of the first to integrate the two together.
Already with 3,000 users, MyT wants to establish significant growth over the next year. With a competitive pricing model, the company’s aim is to gain market share of 10% of UK businesses and 10% of the accounting market. Oumesh was asked by investors how he plans to go up against the large accountancy platforms with huge budgets. He mentioned that there is a substantial market for smaller businesses who didn’t want to pay over £30 per month for accountancy software.