Katapult Accelerator selected 12 exponential technology startups in their second cohort to join the three-month accelerator programme in Oslo, Norway. The Katapult Accelerator made a selection from 1,500 impact-focused startups from all over the world. The 12 chosen startups will use exponential technology to solve the grand challenges of the world and with founders from and operations in India, Kenya, Nigeria, Singapore, USA, Spain, UK, Turkey, South Korea, Morocco, Sweden, Norway and Iceland, they represent nearly all continents. 50% of the selected startups have female founders.
The Katapult Accelerator Fund invests up to USD 150,000 in each startup. Katapult Accelerator also provides a network of global investors and partnerships that can boost the startups in their next phase of development.
“The Katapult Accelerator is a fast-paced and hands-on program to help build and scale startups that can solve environmental or societal challenges through exponential technologies. Our goal for each company is to prepare them for their next round of investment, so that they achieve two to three times their original valuation,” says Haakon Brunell,Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Katapult Accelerator.
Katapult Accelerator delivered on its goals for its first batch of companies. Of the original 12 startups, 11 raised additional funding, and 5 officially closed, or are in the closing process of their rounds.
"The Katapult Accelerator helped us understand and define our reason-for-being and we became laser focused on the next steps of the startup journey,” says Martin Majlund Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Sky.Garden, one of the startups accepted by Katapult in 2017. Sky.Garden recently closed their USD 1.2 million funding round, at a valuation of USD 4 million.
To ensure the same success with the 12 new companies, Katapult Accelerator is inviting the new startups to spend three months in Oslo, Norway and go through an intensive program to leverage their impact. The startups have access to 120+ international mentors, and hands on support from the Katapult Accelerator team.
At the end of the three months, the startups will have defined their vision, strategy, impact orientation, growth marketing and business model. A unique element in the Katapult Accelerator is the focus on team 'body and brain' improvement, to further enable the startups to build on their greatest asset; their mission-driven team. Katapult Accelerator’s partner network includes PWC, Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Microsoft.
About Katapult Accelerator
Katapult Accelerator is a global accelerator that aims to fast-track solutions to global problems within both environmental and societal domains. It supports startups that can address these problems with exponential technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality, augmented reality, and applications of the internet of things. http://katapultaccelerator.com
The startups selected, represent 13 countries and come from varied fields and backgrounds:
Adstuck
Country: India
Adstuck is connecting the unconnected. More than 60 percent of the world’s population remains offline and 80 % of these disconnected live in India and South East Asian countries. Adstuck wants to get them connected and does this through the Adstuck platform. It is a crowdsourcing system, and the platform creates temporary organisations of online specialists allowing for completion of a large variety of tasks. Their main vision is to bring massive work on their platform by reshaping the way work is done. Adstuck plan to bring the disconnected to the platform, skill them for right jobs and build a massive pool of talent online.
ConnectMed
Country: UK and Kenya
ConnectMed is leapfrogging traditional healthcare delivery by building a lightweight, distributed system in low and middle-income countries to provide affordable and convenient care missing in these markets. They do this through an in-pharmacy telehealth service that harnesses machine learning (ML) to utilise healthcare workers intelligently. Specifically, ConnectMed uses ML to predict what type of healthcare worker can appropriately handle a given patient case (triage/allocation) and to automate supervision and guidance of lower skilled healthcare workers (decision support/augmentation).
Deligate
Country: Sweden
Roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption every year, approximately 1.3 billion tonnes, gets wasted. A lot of it goes to waste before it even leaves the grocery stores and at Deligate they are aiming to change that. Deligate provides you with an effective routine for date controls and helps you identify the items that are in the risk zone of expiring. Reduce food waste and guarantee your customers the best quality possible. Provides you with an effective routine for date controls and helps you identify the items that are in the risk zone of expiring. By reducing food wastage, Deligate believes that they can make this world a better and more sustainable place to live in. And this is what matters.
Diwala
Country: Norway
Diwala is a digital economy platform, powered by Blockchain, which enables displaced individuals to build identity through their skills and resources. By digitally documenting and verifying refugee’s skills we provide impact & aid organisations with improved transparency, through a decentralised collaboration platform. Diwala is specifically attacking the UN development goals: 4,5, 8 and 17. They ascertain the current abilities of displaced individuals so they can continue to educate themselves & work. The platform connects displaced individuals with a digital product that incentivises and supports collaboration in displaced communities. Since the skills are connected to a person’s ID, it, therefore, gives women and girls an equal chance to be independent in refugee camps, receptions or asylums. Diwala allows everyone to build their finances independently and will also kick-start a market economy among people supporting their entrepreneurship initiatives.
Ducky
Country: Norway
Ducky is a highly scalable, easy-to-use engagement platform and climate calculator enabling anyone to a) visualise how daily activities impact their carbon footprint, and b) get personalised advice on how tolerable lifestyle changes can reduce their footprint. Ducky utilises web technologies to encourage individuals to live more sustainability. It is designed for corporations to engage their customers and employees in their sustainability strategy on a large scale. Ducky disseminates and applies the latest climate research to raise awareness and educate individuals. Users can easily visualise and quantify how their daily activities impact their carbon footprint and get personalised advice on how sustainable lifestyle changes will reduce their footprint.
FlowVR
Country: Iceland
World Health Organisation has deemed mental health a pandemic of the 21st century due to increased stress amongst other things. FLOWVR helps solve today’s stress and productivity challenges by giving access to meditation’s benefits, regardless of where or when we choose. FLOWVR delivers personalised, interactive meditations via rich guided content, 360° videos and high impact VR technology. Self-guided, rapid immersion, tracking and progress/feedback controls enable their mobile solution to meet the unique needs of companies and individuals. FLOWVR provide highly adaptable stress management tools for people on the go, with effects that are immediate and breathtaking.
Oizom
Country: India, Turkey, South Korea & Morocco
Oizom is an Environmental Solution Company. Through strategic installations, Oizom develops a dense data-grid of networked instruments which helps us understand air pollution and climate change. The monitoring allows for spotting and resolving the sources of pollution. Oizom Big-data is the key to accurate forecasting & change analysis of environmental conditions. Oizom artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms identify unique patterns in ecological dynamics and provide accurate forecasting and predictions through machine learning.
RxAll
Country: USA, Singapore, Nigeria and Kenya.
RxAll is an AI pharmacy platform for pharma authentication, distribution and primary care through which patients and pharmacies in Africa order authenticated medicines and receive tele-pharma primary care. RxAll is an Internet and Big Data startup. Their platform uses a molecular sensor device & a cloud database of spectral signatures of medicines to carry out non-destructive product authentication before pharmacy order fulfilment. They are expanding their business in Africa- currently operational in Nigeria, Kenya and Singapore. Users will find RxAll’s technology unique as it aims to assure the quality of medicines delivered to patients in growth countries.
SceneThere
Country: Sweden
SceneThere’s technology links 360 videos from different places together into a “real virtual world”, where you as a viewer can choose your point of view. SceneThere founders – and long-time friends – Marcus and Marcus built their first 3D world in 1998, but it’s not until the last two years – with the advent of VR – that they’ve been able to realise their vision around interaction and 360 films fully. Having helped world leading research institute “Stockholm Resilience Centre” to use VR to boost empathy for life and challenges for the inhabitant in a Brazilian favela, their technology was shown in 2016 to top-level energy ministers at NY Times Energy for Tomorrow as well as UN’s conference Habitat 3.
SimbaPay
Country: UK, Nigeria and Kenya
SimbaPay is an award-winning mobile app transforming the international and pan-African remittance. With a focus on extreme speed, convenience and constant innovation. Customers are able to send money to loved ones or even merchants, from wherever they are at any time of day or night. The company is headquartered in London and is licensed and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Solatom
Country: Spain
Two-thirds of the energy consumption in various industries are thermal energy, which is produced with expensive and polluting fossil fuels. In the case of heat-intensive sectors, like food processing, for example, thermal energy can represent more than 70% of the overall production costs, squeezing their margins and their competitiveness. Industries looking for solar energy alternatives find that current technologies are only competitive at large scale (over 5MW), making them unviable for most industrial applications. Solatom offers industries a viable alternative to traditional solar projects, producing pre-assembled modules which, connected, form a solar plant. These modules are transportable, and can be entirely built in a factory, as opposed to traditional designs where the whole solar plant must be built on site.
State of Place
Country: USA
State of Place (SOP) is an urban data analytics platform to help placemakers identify and economically justify urban design, planning, and development projects that create thriving places people enjoy. SOP collect about 280 on-the-ground features about the built environment – including the nuts and bolts of streets, like sidewalks, crosswalks, and street width, to the softer elements like facades, benches and trees which ultimately create the State of Place Index. The Index, which ranges from 0 to 100, is broken up into subindices that capture the urban design dimensions empirically to walkability and quality of place. The State of Place Index provides a quick snapshot of what is and what does not work on a block, set of blocks, or neighborhood.