EMEA Xoogler Demo Day 2021
Having pitched my own venture, Zzish, to the inaugural European Xoogler Demo Day back in 2019, it was amazing to see a new batch of Xoogler entrepreneurs pitching yesterday at the 2021 event. In this article I’m going to summarise their pitches, but also give you my personal take. If you enjoy my writing, feel free to check out my recent article “The Rise and Rise of European Edtech” too.
Although there were 15 great startups pitching it’s important to note that these were selected from many more Xoogler applications, which just shows the breadth of incredible European Xoogler talent coming through. I hope that I can write about some of the other amazing companies that didn’t make the cut soon too. Also feel free to reach out to Jenny and Rune if you are interested in particular space.
Thank you
But first a big thank you to Steffen, Jenny, Rune, Aashna and Vanessa for delivering demo day and looking after the European Xoogler community as a whole. It takes a lot of time and effort to put on a two hour show! You guys rock!
And also a quick shout out to the unstoppable Chris Fong who runs Xoogler.co. He somehow always finds the time to attend or dial into every Xoogler demo day around the world no matter when or where they are.
Xoogler founders
Jenny kicked off the session and I think she hit the nail on the head when she said what makes Googlers and Xooglers special is their desire to have impact and change the world. In my four years at Google I interviewed nearly 800 people for Product Management positions and one of the key things I always looked for was passion and that desire to make a difference. I think it’s a trait that you’ll find in every Googler and Xoogler and perhaps that is why Xooglers make such great entrepreneurs.
This demo day also marked something special; first of all more than 100 ex-Googler founded startups with EMEA roots have gone on stage and pitched since 2017 when the first Xoogler London Pitch Day took place (Business Insider coverage). Since then there have been many success stories. Dataform, Scoodle, Zzish, Worksome, Subly, CreativeX, TomatoPay, Dufour Aerospace, Nomagic.ai and many more!
Secondly; this demo day also marked an exciting collaboration between Ex-Googler founders and the Newton Venture Program, which is a JV between London Business School and LocalGlobe educating the tech investors of the future. The collaboration allows for the Newton scholar to apply their learnings as an advisor to the startups who in return gets support on their strategic challenges. The first 9 startups have already been paired with 20 Newton Scholars. If you are an Ex-Googler founder you can apply here and contact Ex-Googler and Newton Scholar Roberta Diana if you want to get involved )
The Pitches …
Neoplants
First up was Lionel Mora to pitch “Bioengineered plants that purify the air”.
We all know how much air pollution there is around the world, particularly in industrial nations such as China. I’m always amazed at just how bad the pollution is in Northern Italy. But even in places like London, there are estimated to be 3,600 to 4,100 deaths a year due to air pollution. Millions around the world suffer from air pollution related health issues and I was personally wearing masks in Beijing long before covid came on the scene.
Neoplants, however, are specifically tackling the problem of indoor air pollution and particularly focussed on the harmful chemicals that common household items continuously emit. They are developing the first generation of bioengineered plants to fight air pollution. If you are an angel with first-hand experience in direct-to-consumer marketing or logistics for the US consumer market then please reach out to Lionel.
LETSMEMO
Eugenia, a Googler who overlapped with me from 2004–2008, has five and seven year old children and has been struggling to find a good solution to preserving and sharing the photos and other media she creates to record their lives.
I have two kids too, now 18 and 21 and their photos and videos are stored over a combination of Google Photos, iCloud, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram and three portable hard drives at home. It’s a mess I know, but I never find the time to properly sort it out. It turns out that I’m not alone and that parents across the world are struggling too.
In short there is no trusted place to keep our children’s stories and LETSMEMO is aiming to be the definitive service for mums. It’s an interesting play and providing a tailored service for mums might just be a big win.
It’s noticeable that Apple announced some related features built into iOS 15 last week, but I’m not a big fan of Apple finding ever more ways to charge me for iCloud storage. Personally I think it’s a little criminal that after I’ve spent $1,000 on a phone they want to charge me even more each month to keep track of the photos I’ve taken. There’s certainly room for an independent player to do it right and safely. (If you are wondering why a Xoogler who helped build the first version of Android has an iPhone … well, that’s a story for another day.)
Eugenia is raising a seed round.
Passbase
Dave’s company Passbase is what I would describe as “identity verification as a service”. Verifying a user’s identity is important to many online services around the world. Whether you are a dating site, a cryptocurrency exchange or one of many other products, being able to snap a photo of a person’s face and their passport and be 100% sure that the person is who they say they are can be a critical part of user registration. Historically you would have to build this service end to end yourself or integrate with an expensive third party service.
Passbase is making it cheap and easy for developers to integrate identity verification into their applications. They could well become as ubiquitous as Stripe, Twillio or SendGrid in their sector. Twillio is of course a $55billion company now and acquired SendGrid for $2b. Stripe is now worth a cool $95 billion. This is one to watch.
Passbase had 20x growth over the last year and is currently raising a Series A.
Athlst
Lanre’s company Athlst is aiming to become the premier “sports lifestyle content” service in Africa. It is a sports news and digital content studio that partners with African athletes to provide immersive stories on YouTube, Instagram and other media platforms.
Sports entertainment in Africa is currently dominated by big broadcasters delivering 90% non-local sports coverage over TV. But the world has moved on and the Instagram generation is increasingly interested in learning more about the history and lifestyle of famous sports personalities. Heck, I’m currently on episode 5 of “Young Rock”, a US sitcom about Dwayne Johnson’s — “The Rock” — childhood. And I don’t even like wrestling!
Athlst has already secured contracts with leading African athletes and is well positioned with a great team to become the premiere service there.
They are raising a seed round.
Climatiq
EU regulations are starting to require companies to disclose their carbon footprint, but most companies do not have a clue how to go about starting this process. Step in Climatiq a service that makes it easy for companies to plug their existing software into tried and tested models that will calculate their carbon footprint for them.
Indeed their goal is to develop software that helps businesses reduce their carbon footprint to zero or automatically offset their carbon footprint. They aim to fully automate the three step process of Measure, Analyze and Reduce. At present there are no such services and most companies undertake a long and time consuming manual process.
Climatiq has already secured funding (so they are not looking to raise money at this time), but they are looking for climate scientists and sustainability experts to join their team.
Optimyze
Thomas Dullien pitched Optimyze, which, among a high quality pool of pitches, was definitely my favourite.
Optimyze is bringing “Google tooling to companies with a large cloud footprint”. Umm, what does that mean?
Put simply for companies like Google, their biggest cost is actually processor time and energy use. At Google it got to the point whilst I was still there in 2006 that they were doing deals with local governments to put Google data centers next to hydroelectric dams so that they could get energy at a reduced cost. However, another key focus has always been to do everything possible to optimise code and minimise processing time and costs. Indeed Google believes it costs them on average 3x less than competitive services to deliver a search result, an important competitive advantage, and the internal tools that they use are a vital ingredient to achieving this.
Whilst it might be obvious that procesor time is a big cost for Google, more and more big normal companies are bringing in-house software off of local servers and computers and into the cloud. So this is starting to become an issue for all companies. The cloud services these companies use, such as AWS or Google Cloud, typically price proportional to the cost of computing time used. Moreover these normal companies are starting to automate more and more manual processes through new technologies such as AI, bringing even more of a company’s costs into the cloud.
But none of these companies have the tools to optimise their software, a process that can reduce the cost of cloud computing by 20% to 30%. As Thomas mentioned, “software efficiency will soon become a board level issue for all companies”.
Optimyze essentially enables any company have Google quality tools to optimise their cloud based software.
Optimyze is currently raising a large Series A
Crurated
Alfonso de Gaetano is a lover of fine wines (so am I, but I’m also quite happy with a £5 chilean merlot from the coop) and he has created Crurated to nurture lovers of wine.
Crurated is in fact the world’s first ever b2c platform for the best winemakers in the world. Just as Elon Musk decided it’s time to cut out the middleman when selling cars to the consumer, Alfonso feels it’s time that the world’s best winemakers to cut out the middleman and sell direct to consumers too. Their goal is to be the trusted platform for the best wine brands in the world.
Whilst the play is simple, they are taking it high tech with the offer of free central storage in state-of-the-art facilities for as long as a member wants and blockchain on every single bottle to ensure authenticity and history.
They launched two weeks ago and have made 400k euros of revenue already with some individual customers spending 40k-50k euros on their own.
They are raising a Series A.
I might register and find out whether they have any good Chilean Merlots in their system :)
Xihelm
James Kent and I go back a long way and he’s one of my go to founders for advice. He and his cofounders have built “the world’s most perfect robotic harvester for glasshouse fruit and vegetables”.
It might surprise you that in the modern digital age, fruit and vegetable harvesting (picking apples and tomatoes to you and me) is still a 99% manual process. This isn’t because human labour is cheap, it’s because developing robots that can reliably pick fruit and vegetables is super hard.
Indeed, fruit farmers would love to cut out human labour for a multitude of reasons, not just cost. Harvesting is highly seasonal and it’s stressful and time consuming to recruit and train labour each year. Moreover, cleanliness is a major issue and crop disease is often caused by the simple act of labourers being careless and using dirty scissors.
The team at Xihelm have put years of effort into refining their technology and have patents to protect their investment.
Robots as a service … pay per kilo picked.
Xihelm are raising a Series A .
Ostorlab
Alaeddine from Ostorlab pitched next. Their service automatically tests mobile apps for security vulnerabilities saving application developers days of effort and providing much more reliable results.
Like many other companies, my own company Zzish delivers mobile versions of our products and like most small companies we’re aware of the need to test for security vulnerabilities, but have little clue how to do it well. Step in Ostorlab, simple automated testing as a service from people who really do know what to test.
Ellogon.ai
Evangelos at Ellongon is fighting cancer by personalising treatment. I’m an investor in Optellum and am a huge fan of the space of medical AI having done my PhD in the machine vision lab at Oxford University along with my ex-wife who was researching automated detection of breast cancer from x-ray mammograms. Sadly my ex-wife then passed away at the age of 44 from ovarian cancer. Indeed 1 in 4 deaths in Europe each year are from cancer.
The good news is that there are now some effective treatments for cancer, one of which is immunotherapy. However, immunotherapy only works for some patients and there is currently no way to work out in advance and at scale which patients it will work for.
It turns out that experts in the field can sometimes identify groups of cells that indicate the patient will be receptive to immunotherapy, but since these cells are hidden amongst millions of other cells, it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Practically it is impossible even for top experts in the field to apply this technique.
This is where Ellogon steps in, they are using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to automatically detect these cells. Indeed special machine learning techniques need to be used since although the leading Dutch cancer research institute they are working with has a labelled data, the dataset is sparse. Using a special sparse learning method allows Ellogon to train on much smaller example data sets than normal.
And did I mention that Evangelos is a Professor in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam and a world class expert in the field? Need I say more.
Q-Modeller
Tim O’Brien pitched his no-code development platform, Q-Modeler. Simply put, Q-Modeler makes it possible for people in your organisation to build custom business applications without needing to know how to write code.
Whilst this might sound unbelievable, it’s here today with a drag and drop visual interface where components are connected together to deliver a flow of data through your systems. Your organisation might still need developers to build custom components for your non coding business people to use, but this overall process is 10X more flexible, agile & cost efficient than any other BPM & API management tool available today.
Model Front
Adam Bittlingmayer and his team are delivering an amazing new translation service for companies that spend a lot on translation. Imagine you are a company like Samsung, you are constantly creating and translating manuals for your devices and it’s a significant cost. Indeed large organisations may spend as much as $50m a year on human translation services.
Whilst these companies could, in principle, use an online service such as Google Translate, the reality is that these services do a poor job on domain specific translation (such as Sumsung’s user manuals) and that using human translators is the only way to do it well.
Today 50% of translation is fully translatable automatically, but 99% of companies do not have the knowledge of how to do it. Step in Model Front. Model Front enables companies to upload their existing corpus of human translations and train a model to automatically translate future text without needing human translators. A simple and effective service powered by some deep technology.
Storeytheapp
Nicole Kobilanski presented my second favourite pitch. On the face of it a mobile app that helps young people share their wardrobe with friends and sell clothes that they no longer wear might sound a bit niche, but Etsy’s acquisition of Depop for $1.6b might make you stop and take note.
At the heart of Depop’s valuation and Storey’s mission is a massive cultural shift towards sustainable fashion that, whilst still in its infancy, will become mainstream before long. Whilst grumpy old men like me would never consider sharing their wardrobe or selling clothes second hand, for the youth of today it is becoming the norm driven by a desire to protect the environment as much as to save money on clothes.
Here’s a quick multiple choice question for you … how many litres of water does it take to make a pair of jeans? 10, 100, 1,000 or 10,000. The answer is of course a staggering 10,000 liters of water. Indeed the fashion industry, and you and I as consumers, are the cause of the environmental devastation in the Central Asian inland sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral sea is now almost completely dried up.
Sustainable fashion is the only answer and clothing reuse is a key component. Storey helps users record their clothes purchases at the point of purchase online and then makes it easy for users to share it with friends and sell unused clothes to others.
Storey isn’t currently raising, but Nicole is very happy to talk to angel investors for their next round.
Wanderness
Manolis has built Wanderness to provide curated properties for the digital nomad.
If you like to work remotely and also like to spend from a few weeks to a few months in interesting cities around the world before moving on, it is hard to find a place to live and successfully close the contract. Wanderness takes all the hassle out of this allowing people to rent high quality curated homes around the world on a flexible basis. Think Airbnb, but for stays of one to six months.
Their MVP has already generated $70k of revenue and they have raised $1.2m of a $2m round already.
WiggleDesk
William Wildridge has developed an application to make it super quick and simple for office managers to turn office space into a flexible working space where employees can book desks and meeting rooms for the days they come into the office
Of course, such applications are not new per se, but what makes WiggleDesk so powerful is just how quick and easy it is to use. Competitor products typically take days to set up, but with WiggleDesk anyone can quickly create a map of their office, drag and drop desks and meeting rooms into it and have employees booking rooms within an hour. Moreover with a simple pay as you go pricing model of £5 per active user per month there are no expensive upfront costs.
Contact William if you would like to know more.