Unruly Hosted Our Fifth Demo Day, And It Was Awesome

Our startups smashed it and we couldn't be more proud, as our fifth annual Demo Day has now sailed, with some incredible brands, impressive investors and of course, some madness sprinkled in for good luck.

With video ad tech company Unruly hosting our milestone fifth cohort Demo Day, we showcased our newest startups alongside some of the very best scaleups to have graduated the programme, including Miappi, Seenit, CampaignAmp, Pixoneye and LivingLens. Brands such as Unilever, dunnhumby, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ogilvy also joined.

#ColliderDD17 crowd 💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻 pic.twitter.com/VwPuRjevwG

— Collider (@ColliderGB) March 28, 2017

The event was also the kick-off for our deepening relationship with Unruly, which aims to give back to the ecosystem.

Unruly CEO and co-founder Sarah Wood, who has mentored some of Collider’s most successful companies for a number of years, said: “Events like Collider’s Demo Day are the perfect way to connect London’s brightest founders with the people that can help bring their ideas to life.

“For Unruly, it was an unbeatable opportunity to give back to the MadTech ecosystem and encourage the next generation of businesses that will transform our industry - and on a personal level, being surrounded by start-ups in their discovery phase is always inspiring!

"With organisations like Collider, I'm confident we'll see the next unicorn come from London."

Good-Loop, one of our 2017 startups and an app which incentivises users to watch ads by donating to a charity of their choice once they reach a particular point in the video, won our 2017 Demo Day award - voted for by the crowd throughout the day.

We are thrilled to announce we are the winners of the Collider 2017 Demo Day!!! A huge thank you to the @ColliderGB team x x pic.twitter.com/JclKzMI5LO

— Good-Loop (@good__loop) March 28, 2017

The other incredible 2017 MadTech startups that pitched were:

Vensy

Vensy is a sports marketing platform that provides a simple way for brands to discover the best athletes to sponsor, while also helping athletes build and monetise their marketability.

Frenzi

Frenzi is a fast and easy platform that allows brands to build and publish engaging and interactive display ad campaigns across different online and mobile publishers.

Rate8

Rate8 is a mobile and web-based platform for consumers that give instant feedback on fashion and lifestyle items within e-commerce sites, from friends or via the Crowd.

Tweepforce

Tweepforce turns private messages into commerce opportunities by allowing users to directly buy from brands within DM conversations on Twitter.

Pearlai

Péarlaí is a technology platform that allows shopping centres to map shopper’s journies and interactions with vendors in order to customise their experience.

Adlaunch

Adlaunch enables simple, fast video creation and editing directly in a browser, enabling anyone to create good-looking video content. The platform has plans to include unique AI technology to enable even faster video creation based on image recognition and user data.

Greengame

Greengame wants to make sustainable living the norm with technology that automatically tracks activities that impact the environment – enabling cities and brands to engage and reward people for living sustainably.

The Collider Class of 2017

Our Class of 2017 have been on one hell of a journey the past 16 weeks. They've met over 10 curious, ambitious brands helping them to validate their proposition, mingled with endless investors and presented some pretty incredible decks. So without further a do, please meet our 2017 startups.

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Vensy

Vensy is a platform that provides a simple way for brands to discover the best athletes to sponsor, powering their marketing campaigns, whilst also helping athletes build and monetise their marketability.

Frenzi

Frenzi Media is the fastest and easiest platform for brands to build and publish engaging interactive ad campaigns across different online and mobile publishers.

Rate8

Rate8 is a mobile and web-based platform for consumers to get instant feedback on fashion and lifestyle items, from friends or via the Crowd. For brands, Rate8 represents a commercially viable source of item-based and user-based preference data.

Pearlai

Péarlaí provides shopping centre managers with an easy to use platform which enables them to delight their shoppers, impress their tenants and provide detailed data to their landlords – all accessible to them at the click of button.

Good-Loop

Good-Loop unites brands, publishers and people in the shared endeavour of converting advertising money into charitable donations.

Tweepforce

Tweepforce – the social media commerce platform, turning private messages into transactions.

AdLaunch

AdLaunch enables simple, fast video creation and editing directly in your browser, so anyone can create good looking video content, not just professionals. The platform will soon include unique AI technology to enable even faster video creation based on image recognition and user data.

Greengame

Greengame wants to make sustainable living the norm. Our tech automatically tracks people’s activities that impact the environment - and enables cities and brands to engage and reward them for living sustainably.

The Mad World of MadTech: February Roundup

1. Startup alum Locomizer rank in AI Tech Startups to Watch 2017

Following a number of pretty exciting updates (including a cheeky interview in Forbes), our class of '13 alumni are making us proud again.

Tech.eu has highlighted the biological intelligence tech team as one of the startups tech enthusiasts should keep an eye on for the upcoming year.

Great work guys. Read more here.

2. LivingLens secures £1.3m funding AND becomes finalist for SXSW Accelerator Competition

The LivingLens team are having a pretty impressive few weeks with two top announcements, starting with an incredible £1.3m funding round.

The mix of investors includes the Angel CoFund, angel investors from their involvement in our accelerator programme and successful marketeers and financiers.

This follows their recent win after being selected as a finalist for SXSW Accelerator Competition, in which only those leading startups from around the world are selected to take part in.

Good luck for the upcoming pitch event on March 12th!

Read more here.

3. Seenit and SyncSpot's founders stopped Forbes 30 under 30 list

A huge congratulations to Emily from Seenit and Jubair from SyncSpot for making the Forbes 30 under 30 list – a serious achievement.

Read more here.

How To Be Successful In A Startup Accelerator

After relaunching our Collider quarterly MadTech drinks, it would only be right to get someone to say a few inspirational words to a room of startups, investors and brands, right? And that someone could only have been Carl Wong from Living Lens. Check out his top six tips to all startups on how to really get the most from an accelerator programme.

1. Play the long game.

Don't ever forget who you've spoken to. Meet them. Follow up with them. Make demands of their time, but play the long game.

2. Keep at it.

It's bloody hard raising money, and much, much harder than you think it is now [early stage]. You have to keep at it, you have to keep going, and it's going to take three times as much effort and three times as long in terms of time. If you do keep at it, you will make it happen.

3. Craft your story.

That's a learnt skill, not an art. There's a way to tell your story, but make sure you know it inside out.

4. Be bold.

Show off. It's not about what you think you may be able to do, but what could you do if you had everybody behind you and all the starts aligned.

5. Be prepared.

You should be prepared for all the questions – that's what's going to help you in shaping, thinking about your product market fit, who your competitors are, what is your pricing, your distribution, how are you different from the rest, how do you prove that? Who is going to beat you? You need to know the answers to all of that because somebody is going to ask you and you need to be coherent.

6. Love it.

Have a brilliant time, because, do you know what? You may never get the exit. You may never even fundraise to the level that you want to. But if you keep thinking about tomorrow, you're not going to be able to enjoy today.

Launching in Amsterdam with a bang

We couldn't just launch in Amsterdam without something pretty special, which is why this week some of our team headed out to the Dutch capital for our second popup.

Bringing brands and startups together is what we do best, and so this time round we were joined by a number of senior team members from both KPN and NS, hosted in Deloitte's iconic The Edge building.

Working with Ellen, Amsterdam Collider's co-founder to help establish their challenges, we identified the best startups to select for the popup and work directly with the teams.

Joined by a number of Collider startups including Pixoneye, Scoop Retail, Syncspot, Locomizer and Seenit, Collider Booster startup Duel, we also welcomed three startups from Belgium and Holland – Cabture, Social Seeder and Storymail.

Trial funds were up for grabs, so the popup meant business and gave both the startups and brands the chance to really knuckle down to see where they could work together.

But KPN and NS struggled to only pick one each, and so with Social Seeder and Storymail picked as the number-one-let's-do-this, there were many other promises of future conversations for others.

Ellen said: We designed the popup as a highly interactive session, where the corporates shared their challenges and topics of interests, allowing to identify together relevant applications of the startups’ technologies. KPN and NS have each chosen a startup for a trial project and invited several startups for follow-on conversations."

You'll be hearing much more from us in Amsterdam as we're now open for applications, as we scour the globe for the very best startups to join our first ever programme in Amsterdam. You can apply right here.