Digital Catapult’s Platinum Awards winners announced

In the last twelve months, 90 companies on Digital Catapult programmes have raised over £130 million in private investment and funding grants. Last night, Digital Catapult, announced the winners of its inaugural Platinum Awards, a prestigious new initiative that recognises and celebrates the most impactful advanced digital technology startups and scaleups, as judged by an eminent independent panel.

Jeremy Silver, CEO of Digital Catapult, said: “Our expertise is in designing facilities and programmes ahead of the market to help companies of all sizes collaborate at the leading edge of frontier technologies. The Platinum Awards celebrate the stars of our programmes, demonstrating how their innovative products, solutions and experiences are having an impact. They show how rich and talented the UK tech community is and we’re delighted that the Platinum Awards recognise their achievements. We’re thrilled to help these and all the companies on our programmes scale up faster and bring exciting new better targeted products to market. They are trailblazers opening new markets and new sectors and sharpening the UK’s global competitive edge.”

The ceremony, held in London, brought together a wide range of guests from across the UK’s digital community. Priya Guha, venture partner at Merian Ventures and member of the Innovate UK Council opened the event, and Grammy Award winner Imogen Heap presented the awards to the eight winning startups which have all been part of Digital Catapult’s programmes: CreativeXR, Augmentor, Machine Intelligence Garage, 5G Testbed Accelerator Programme, LPWAN Testbed, Immersive Labs and Cyber 101

The winners are (in alphabetical order):

axial3D (AI)
aaxial3D is a 3D printing firm that helps to transform the pre-operative planning and patient consent process in healthcare, while making 3D printing routine for complex cases. axial3D’s mission is to improve the quality of care that hospitals provide by giving clinicians easy access to patient-specific 3D models. axial3D has won multiple industry and technology, awards, received media recognition on the BBC, ITV News, and coverage in the US and Europe and has closed $3m in funding rounds as a result of its work with the Digital Catapult.

BIOS (AI)
BIOS combines neural engineering with AI to leverage the nervous system to enable more effective treatments for a range of chronic conditions. BIOS is positioned to be the platform on which a new generation of AI treatments can be built to help billions of people suffering from chronic disease to improve their quality of life. Digital Catapult helped position BIOS as a ground-breaking scaleup, raising $4.5 million, and has won research grants worth over £1 million in total from Innovate UK, SBRI, and NIHR to support clinical validation trials for its AI tool.

Humanising Autonomy (AI)
Humanising Autonomy is building the global standard of how autonomous systems interact with people. Using AI and machine learning, its software can predict pedestrian, cyclist and other vulnerable road user behaviour and intent in real-time to improve the safety of global mobility systems. The business has raised $5.3 million in investment and opened doors for new opportunities in the manufacturing industry.

Intellisense.io (AI)
An industrial artificial intelligence company making mining operations efficient, sustainable and safe through trusted and open AI solutions. Its platform brains.app and applications are used across mining operations in Chile, Australia, Kazakhstan, Brazil and South Africa with a focus on the mine to marketing value chain. The business significantly enhanced the ability to train new models and speed up the development of new products having worked with Digital Catapult, and solved interoperability challenges to successfully deliver a joint venture with Kazakhstan Government.

IoT Solutions (IoT)
IoT Solutions Group is an end to end IoT solution provider. It is not just a systems integrator, it develops and delivers its own IP across the whole IoT value chain – hardware, software and network connectivity. Since working with Digital Catapult it has received €58,000 FED4SAE grant to support product development.

Mativision (VR/5G)
Mativision, a specialist in interactive 360° content and applications (VR/AR and MR), is emerging as a UK pioneer in 5G services. Its 5G-ready immersive content delivery platform leverages 5G’s capabilities to enable the creation and delivery of immersive social experiences to global audiences. It has raised total seed round investment of £655,000, seeing a 40% increase in sales revenue in the past 18 months and export revenue increased by 75%.

See.Sense (IoT)
See.Sense exists to make cycling better. It has developed award-winning bike lights that give cyclists more visibility on their ride, and cities more information on their roads. Its lights are used by more than 30,000 cyclists across 70 countries. Since working with Digital Catapult it has been stocked by major retailers including Halfords and Evans, raised £1.1 million investment, and won EU project Synchronicity which led to commercial projects in Oxfordshire and North East Lincolnshire.

Smartify (AR/5G)
Smartify is a free app which helps people connect with art. Users can scan artwork with a smartphone and, using Smartify’s image recognition technology, unlock the stories behind the art, create a digital personal art collection and share with the Smartify community. Smartify delivers immersive visitor experiences and has been named ‘the Shazam and Spotify of art’. The valuation of business increased by 300%, 30% as a direct result of working with Digital Catapult and has over half a million active users.

Priya Guha and Imogen Heap were two of the eminent line up of judges for the first Digital Catapult Platinum Awards, which also included:

• Sam Brown, Programme Manager, doteveryone
• Scott Carey, Group Editor, IDG Media
• Paul Clarke, CTO, Ocado
• Alissa Dhaliwal, Head of Innovation, CBI
• Marcus du Sautoy FRS OBE, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford
• Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science; Non-Executive Director, Digital Catapult
• Mark Melling, Head of RYOT Studio EMEA at Verizon Media
• Rob Prevett, Co Founder & CEO, Disruption
• Liz Rosenthal, Founder & CEO, Power to the Pixel; programmer, Venice International Film Festival; executive producer CreativeXR
• Alexander Woolf, Director, Huddle

You can re-watch the live-streamed ceremony in full via Digital Catapult’s YouTube channel here.

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