Collider completes £1M Investment into Class of 2015 Startups

Collider, the leading MadTech Accelerator in London, completes their Class of 2015 investment with a second round of £550,000 into six of the most promising marketing and adtech (also known as MadTech) startups from the Collider Class of 2015. After Collider’s Class of 2015 Demo Day at the end of April, these startups were hand-picked by the individual investors to receive up to £100,000 follow-on funding as part of the Collider Accelerator programme. They will now participate in a further 8-month long programme. This is geared towards high growth and preparing the founders to raise a late seed to Series A funding round in 2016. This programme will focus on getting the startups initial traction through commercial trials and deals.

Rose Lewis, Co-Founder of Collider says; “We have found a gap in startup funding which exists between seed and Series A. This is where a significant number of startups fail. This second round of funding will give these amazing MadTech startups the runway they need to gain the necessary traction to raise series A more quickly.”

These six companies have founders from around the world including; Israel, Slovenia, the UK, USA, Australia, Hungary who have all chosen the UK as their company headquarters. The startups solve enduring problems big brands and agencies face on the customer journey including; brick-and-mortar retail analytics, short form video, tracking ‘dark social’ sharing and targeted mobile advertising.

The six selected startups:

[one_third] [/one_third] Brandvee is an audience development platform for media brands that finds, tracks and targets the most influential customers who drive conversion.

[one_third][/one_third] Burst makes big data from little videos and have built the world’s first social video analytics platform which helps organisations understand how to spend more effectively on short-form video.

[one_third][/one_third] Pixoneye  uses people’s photos and videos that they have stored on their mobile devices in order to extract very clever data about them, completely anonymously. By understanding the user through their photos we are able to serve the right ad to the right user no matter what app they are using!

[one_third][/one_third] Real Life Analytics enables targeted advertising on any digital screen. Using patented visual recognition technology we can enable every screen to recognise who is in front of it and serve them exactly the right targeted content in milliseconds.

[one_third][/one_third] Storesense interprets customer journeys in traditional brick-and-mortar stores using passive Wi-Fi. Our advanced proprietary algorithms drive actionable retail advice – from low traffic zone warnings and optimal in-store advertising position suggestions to the best locations for resting areas.

[one_third][/one_third] SyncSpot harnesses the power of entertainment to move people by offering exclusive content that can only be accessed once a customer is at a specific location.

Guest Post: A Day in the Life of Miappi

** This is a guest post by Julia Merritt, Portfolio Strategy Manager at Camelot a Collider Brand partner. Julia piloted a secondment programme **

Being a member of the Collider Programme at Camelot, we were offered the opportunity to spend a day with a digital start up in order to live and learn – in real time – about the challenges start ups face.

Through my existing links with Miappi – a start up that aggregates social content into a simple interface – I was lucky enough to spend the day with them last week.

The day kicked off with a pitch at a digital agency, where I met the CEO of Miappi, Andrew, having ‘ran’ from a previous pitch at another agency. It was great to sit in on a pitch to a digital agency and Andrew and his colleague Dave showcased what Miappi could do. The demo spoke for itself and it was really well received – so much so that other agency team members were pulled in to see the demo working and Andrew launched into his elevator pitch – the meeting went really well!

Heading back to Miappi’s offices, impressively located on the Southbank with views to die for, the serviced offices were a hive of activity. Miappi rent office space for the 6 strong startup, and use the communal meeting rooms and social areas. Full of other start ups and small businesses – this free space allows for great networking and exposure to a wide range of different contacts.

A bit of a contrast to the corporate environs of a business park in Watford! Beer, coffee and soft drinks on tap, open plan, hot desks, arcade games, ping pong and a few resident dogs kept the vibe relaxed but buzzing.

Sitting in a technical development session, it was fascinating to see the developers work in progress prototypes and how they worked through challenges together, adapting and changing to continuously improve their offer. Never standing still, continuous improvements and adapting to new clients requirements ensures the product is flexible and can offer something for everyone.

Chatting with Miappi, what struck me the most was the way they are living and working ‘in the moment’. Whilst we are working on our 5 year plans – they are working on plans for the next 5 months. Whilst this brings its challenges – particularly around having to initially work at a loss while the offer builds; working in such an agile way engenders a sense of urgency, excitement and freedom – allowing for more spontaneity and adapting to new opportunities as they arise.

This is a learning I will take back to the business to see how we can ‘sprint’ smaller projects to test and learn, in amongst the larger projects that do take longer to achieve.

It was great to get an insiders view of a startup - literally running between meetings, seizing the moment, adapting and ideating – it demonstrated speed of thought and flight of foot. Thank you!

Innovation is not an event

**This post originally appeared on The Drum**

Everytime I go to an agency, the first word out of their mouths, 90 per cent of the time, is ‘innovation’. Either I am speaking with the head of innovation, or the head of mobile has dropped the I-word in the first few minutes. They have embraced it in their vision, but are trying to figure out how to bring it inside the organisation.

One way agencies do this is by holding ‘innovation days’. A handful of startups are brought into the agency and asked to pitch their ideas to a room full of account managers eager to hear exciting new tech ideas from the startups. The account managers at best go away with something new to talk about with colleagues and maybe clients, but it rarely goes beyond ‘that was interesting’.

For a company that has less than 10 employees, the cofounders will usually attend an event like this. They think it’s a quick way to get in front of people in agencies who they believe will lead them to the brands and a commercial deal. The founders give up their very scarce time to come and meet them and go away with nothing – not even feedback on the product/pricing – really valuable insight that agencies have.

Often the startups don’t get the opportunity to discuss the key challenges facing the account managers/brands and how best their tech can solve them either. They aren’t given the opportunity to work on their products and make the necessary changes to get the right product/market fit. Without a dialogue, the best startups will not bother coming back to the agency – and we are already seeing this happen.

Innovation should not be thought of as an event. These ‘innovation days’ are the beginning of the process, but they aren’t innovation, nor can you ‘do’ innovation in these days. What can you really learn from a startup from 10-minute pitch anyway? Just the very nature of the set-up ‘pitch’ means that it’s a one way monologue, not a dialogue.

There must be next steps in place for startups to keep coming back. You, as the agency, must initiate the follow-up. Set the expectations on your staff to take action on what they have seen in just a few hours. Open up a dialogue, introduce them to others in your agency, or recommend them. Your colleagues might have ideas you haven’t thought of. Because if there is no follow-up, believe that the best startups will not be coming back. They have a million other things to be getting on with, another showcase is not on the top of their list.

Collider12 Alumnus Avocarrot raises $2M

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]  

We’ve got big news from the US – Collider12 alumnus Avocarrot have just closed a $2M seed round! We’re so happy for the guys, who moved to San Francisco after participating in the first Collider programme in London. Their round is made up of investors Giorgos Zacharia, Darling Ventures, Odyssey Ventures L.P. After an exclusive VentureBeat article provided some insights into the native mobile ad space, we had the chance to get down to the details with Co-Founder Conno Christou. Read on for some insights into working across the pond, raising funding, and the challenges of running a multi-national company from Conno.

[/spb_text_block] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/2" el_position="first"]

•         What were some of the struggles and opportunities you faced when moving to SF?

The biggest struggle is to find a way to network and get out the word for the company to a totally new audience in a new environment with brutal competition and noise. There’s not a standard recipe to succeed on this, however the 3 tips from me would be to try and keep your confidence levels high at all costs, to listen carefully even if you don’t necessarily agree and to be as specific as possible when asking for favours.

If you re a first timer and you'll learn by doing, then by definition you'll make a lot of mistakes that will seem silly to you after a while. The large abundance of potential clients, partners and investors in Silicon Valley will help you accelerate this learning process to nail your pitch and understand better the mechanics of the game. Remember to listen carefully to what everybody has to say.

•         This is a big seed round of funding. How will you manage the money and how far are you expecting it to take you?

In Europe this might be one of the biggest seed rounds so far, however in Silicon Valley it is rather the norm. A general rule of thumb is that you get the money for 12-18 months runway. In our case, we'll mostly invest in expanding the team with exceptional people both in SF and Europe, while at the same time market the ad exchange to both app developers and demand sources.

[/spb_text_block] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/2" el_position="last"]

•         How did you choose your investors for this round and how long did it take? Was it what you anticipated?

It was much worse than we thought - both in terms of time and resources but also in terms of energy consumption and expectations. The VC game in SV is extremely different compared to Europe and the time to adapt to the new rules might be underestimated. A VC once told me that bad fundraising looks like a 100 no’s and a successful one like 99 no’s. As you see, continuous rejections are part of the process, which at some point makes you question your own credibility and value, resulting to low confidence. Remember that if you lose your confidence then you lose the game.

•         You have some of your team based in Greece and others in SF with visits back and forth to London. What are some of the highlights and pitfalls of running an international company?

You get to see lots of different people and replicate processes to create a quick buzz in new territories, given that you know what you re doing. The challenge is that you have to be disciplined and systematic on how to maintain excellent communication bridges between the distributed teams. A catalyst here is to create strong, well-defined processes and find ways to enforce them so that the team embraces them and doesn't reject them.

[/spb_text_block] [blank_spacer height="30px" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]

•         What advice would you give to entrepreneurs in the MadTech space who are looking to raise a similar round to you?

The mobile adtech space is a huge space that is kind of doomed and blessed at the same time. Doomed because there s a lot of noise and few successes; blessed because unlike the web adtech landscape, there are no dominant players in the mobile space yet, so there s a huge opportunity to be amongst the first ones.

If you re looking to get money, then start meeting with VCs at least a month earlier to start getting to know them under no time pressure. If you have a rockstar team and a strong vision then you have pretty good chances to secure a seed round. If you manage to report steep hockey sticks in your KPI graphs then you have great chances for a big seed. Don’t give up and stay confident. 99 no’s is the norm..

[/spb_text_block]

From Moment.us to Preceptiv: A Pivotal Journey

** This is a guest post from Andrew Ko, Co-Founder of Preceptiv **

Pivoting. The very definition means to turn on or around a central point, and this is what we did as a business. Our central point was the idea that useful insights for companies could be extracted from people’s music listening behaviours. This main idea has never changed since the beginning of our journey. However, the way we went about it before our pivot is completely different to how we are going about it now. Let me explain...

The company started out with the BIG IDEA of revolutionizing the way advertising was experienced and consumed. This concept got us into the Collider programme in London and jump started our road to the 'Billion Pound' idea. We created our own free streaming music app (no ads or subscription fee) with the hopes of gaining traction rapidly and attracting advertisers onto our platform.

Describing our music player in a nutshell, it displayed other people’s “moments” (hence our first company name: Moment.Us) with the song you were currently listening to so that you can experience what they experienced when they were listening to that same song. This created a more social and connected music listening experience and was a fun way to discover new music socially, an idea that I still hope gets implemented in the future by one of the larger players (ie. Spotify, Google, etc). The app was also beautiful, which was usually the first thing a new user would tell us. It was iOS 7 flat design before iOS 7 was released by Apple. So we thought we had everything tied down: the concept, the platform and the music licenses. Now all we needed was to convince brands to start putting their ads in there and we’d be in business because, I mean, how hard could it possibly be to attract a million users to our platform while giving away free full-length songs?

But what was that saying again? “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Yeah, that’s what happened to us. It wasn’t for lack of trying though, as our team did its very best to make it a success. But when we approached brands or advertisers, we ran into a few problems. The three most common were:

1. They wouldn’t get on board without the user numbers
2. They wanted to see proof that it worked before they committed
3. They wouldn’t pay for the music royalties

We essentially ran into the 'chicken-and-egg' scenario in which we couldn’t get advertisers on board if we didn’t have enormous amounts of traction, but we wouldn’t be able to pay for the amount of music we were giving away unless we had revenue coming from the advertisers.

We also learned that giving away free music didn’t help sell the app (trying to buy word-of-mouth advertising) and that we actually needed money for marketing.

The numbers our app generated told a two-sided story:

In terms of user numbers to appease brands and get them on board, it was quite small. We managed to attract around 3000 users from the UK on word-of-mouth marketing as our app was limited to UK iOS users only (due to music license and resource restrictions).

However, in terms of engagement numbers, it was through the roof (higher than Facebook sponsored posts) and people found this way of music discovery extremely enjoyable.

Based on the feedback we received, we knew that our concept of using music to connect people was solid but the way we delivered it was just too expensive for anyone to buy into. So now what?

We had to pivot fast as we were running out of time and money. So we took our special sauce (our knowledge in connecting music with people’s experiences), threw out the delivery mechanism (the streaming music app) and started over again.

Music + Personality

We knew that our strength was linking music to people’s behaviours, experiences and identities so we decided to start there.

One of the key elements that people liked about our app was using music to determine someone’s state of mind. But what if we could also use music to determine not just someone’s state of mind at a particular time, but also their personality overall. This was actually a part of my PhD research; how music can be used to figure out people’s identities or personalities. The reason being that there really is nothing more personal than the music we listen to.

Armed with this new idea (and a new name: Preceptiv), we set off to verify that we could build such an engine. Drawing on previous academic research in this field, our mission was to turn raw quantitative music listening data into rich, insightful qualitative data that can be used to profile people’s personalities.

Why personalities you ask? Because we looked at the current state of the customer analytics market and they only profile users in two-dimensions - demographics and behaviours. However, the key to our technology is that it enables companies to profile their customers in three-dimensions by adding the key missing variable: psychometrics. This additional signal informs companies the motivations behind their customers’ actions and enables them to take the appropriate action to increase engagement, conversion and loyalty.

I’ll give you a very simple example: If Expedia knew that Joe (who’s 35 and lives in San Francisco) recently took a trip to Vietnam and they wanted to recommend him other places to visit, they’d probably suggest other trips to Southeast Asia just based on the fact that he went to Vietnam but not knowing what he did while he was there. However, if Expedia also knew that Joe is the adventurous type and likes thrills (because of his personality type), they could also send him more relevant and meaningful recommendations such as a safari trip to Africa or a volcano hiking excursion in Hawaii (which is closer to home for him). It’s been scientifically proven that a key aspect of what drives us through life and motivates our actions is through our personality. Being able to tap into this insight is incredibly powerful, and to do it on mobile devices (instead of solely on the web) is a dream for most companies.

This is actually what our secret sauce is all about and why we’re extremely excited about our pivot. We’ve cracked how to gather all of this data on mobile devices in seconds, with the same accuracy as a 50-question personality test, and without the user having to provide any input manually. It only takes minutes to harness the power of our technology, as its just a simple SDK being dropped into a mobile app. However, we realize that music is subjective so we need to continue collecting data, testing and refining our model in order to provide as accurate a view about people’s personalities as possible.

And that’s what we’re doing right now. Once we prove this works, there are a whole range of applications and companies that could benefit from the results of our experiment (we’re currently targeting the retail, financial and travel verticals). We’ve had great responses so far, trialling the technology with a few companies and getting useful feedback to refine our model. But we’re not done yet. All of this work is required for our journey towards the holy grail of startups: product / market fit. It’s taken us quite a while to get to this point, with a lot of twists and turns, but it’s definitely been worth it.