Imperial students take the Venture Catalyst Challenge

Fungi Alert at the 2015 CDT Den

Over the past six weeks Imperial student teams have been developing science and technology ideas to compete for a £10,000 prize.

The 14 teams have been taking part in this year’s Venture Catalyst Challenge (VCC) - the UK’s only broad science and technology focused ‘pre-accelerator’.  Consisting of a program of workshops, mentoring sessions and networking events the challenge, run by Imperial Create Lab in partnership with Imperial Innovations, has seen the students develop ideas and projects on issues such as food security and improving business intelligence.

Mark Hammond, Director, Imperial Create Lab said: “The VCC is designed to enable students and early stage researchers to explore the commercial application of their inventions in the real world in a risk free way that is tailored to fit around other commitments.

“We work with teams that range from agriculture to power generation across many different technologies. Over 70% of teams continuing to work on their businesses after graduation and we are now seeing many of the teams begin to take off with over £4m raised in the past three years in pre-seed proof of concept funding and many happy customers.”

This year’s VCC entrants include:

FungiAlert, formed by Angela de Manzanos and Kerry O’Donnelly, is a simple to use device that can alert farmers to the presence of phytophthora spores before it can infect crops, yielding potentially billion dollar savings.

SweetGenerator, formed by Dan Malk and Javier Rubio-Garcia, is a method for converting the billions of tons of waste water released by factories every year into extremely low cost electricity.

YakHub, formed by Dan Leary, Nim Sukumar, Philip Fortio and Tom Murray, is a plug & play, scalable call centre that can be deployed quickly and with low capital expenditure, opening up the benefits of call centres to many more businesses.

A full list of entrants is available on the VCC website

Nine of the best teams from the VCC will be pitching at the 4^th annual Imperial Showcase on 19 of March. The event, which is open to College staff, students and the general public, takes place in the Sir Alexander Fleming building between 6:30pm and 9:00pm and will feature the teams pitching their business ideas to a panel of top venture capitalists and experienced business people, with the winning team taking home the £10,000 cash prize.

The full panel includes:

• Professor James Stirling, Provost, Imperial College London
• Russ Cummings, CEO, Imperial Innovations
• Kelsey Lynn, Investment Director, Imperial Innovations
• Eulian Roberts, Chief Executive, Imperial West Enterprises at Imperial College London
• Matt Clifford, CEO, Entrepreneur First
• Andrew Muir, Investment Director, Midven

On the same night, audience members will hear pitches from the entrants of the Student Breakthrough Innovation award. The award, developed by Imperial Create Lab in partnership with Imperial and Google X, is a staff-nominated award that recognises ‘moonshot solutions’ – science-fiction-like breakthroughs with the potential to improve hundreds of millions of lives.

The winning pitch will receive a £3,000 cash prize and have their project reviewed and featured on Google X’s Moonshot Platform – Solve for X.

Tickets to the event are available here