A group of 15 start-ups have been chosen to embark on the Ignite North East pre-accelerator programme.
Each of the participating teams will receive £10,000 grant funding along with mentoring from tech entrepreneurs, and workshops led by founders and investors in the six month programme. The North of Tyne Combined Authority-funded scheme is the third to be delivered by Ignite as part of a regional partnership that hopes to build North East digital businesses.
Among the businesses to starting the pre-accelerator on January 9 is Affectronics, which uses pain monitoring and reporting to help clinicians treating babies in intensive care. That team is joined by smart ticketing operator Brava and 'co-working as a service' idea Floe which helps landlords use unoccupied commercial spaces.
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Meanwhile grant funding search engine Fundify joins the cohort along with data insights company Insightano which helps non-techy people with analysis. And Javel Groupe uses artificial intelligence to help insurers make their contracts better understood, while Let&Net provides fashion sample management tools.
Crafter and small business marketplace Mayfli is also among the group, along with sustainable household products firm Nothing is Left. Rise Learning Group provides new starter induction services for companies and ROXID offers data management tools for heritage management.
Billed as a free dating app with no fake profiles Safer Date is also part of the cohort, while manufacturing digitisation specialist SQCDP and ecommerce provider Sugercoat are joining the programme. And Vibbl, a digital tool to help teachers manage efficient verbal feedback, is the among the 15 teams.
Jo York, CEO of Ignite Accelerator, said: "The number of applications for the programme has grown by nearly 50% - a great indicator that more and more North East residents are thinking about starting a business. We were once again blown away by the quality of the applications, which made it a very difficult process to choose our 15 teams.
"The teams for this year’s pre-accelerator come from a range of sectors: from start-ups working in fashion sampling to manufacturing processing and smart ticketing for gigs. This means that we have a rich skillset within the cohort to enable peer learning. We also have around a 40/60 female/male gender split.
"Ignite focuses on founders and on giving them the support they need to create scalable businesses - I can’t tell you how excited I am to start working with these amazing people."
Ignite teams will also get to access more than £250,000 in credits from programme partners such as Amazon Web Services, Hubspot and Stripe.
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