Pictured: Tarryn Gorre, founder and CEO of Kafoodle and winner of the Startup Summit Competition 2017 on stage at the Assembly Rooms for SUS17.

We are thrilled to announce the semi-finalists for Startup Summit Competition 2019! The eight tech startups include winners of Scottish EDGE and Investing Women AccelerateHER, with a combined investment of over £2M to date.

This year's competition is hotly contested, with the founders of Desana, who recently raised £550k in seed money, and Good-Loop, a Scottish tech for good company harnessing the value of ethical advertising to create social impact, among those through to the semi-final.

The annual award is a pathway to Silicon Valley for UK tech startups, with a fully funded place on FutureX's Silicon Valley Accelerate programme 2020 on offer for the winner. They will also receive over £225,000 in business support from Johnston Carmichael, AAI EmployAbility, The Herald, IBM and STV.

The Silicon Valley Accelerate programme takes a select group of rising UK tech leaders to Silicon Valley. There, they have the opportunity to connect with some of the global players in the tech industry and pitch to potential investors. Previous cohorts have met with executives from Airbnb, Facebook, SurveyMonkey, RocketSpace, Y Combinator, Waze, and Threshold.

This year sees the eighth iteration of the competition and a shift to include a 'tech for good' criteria. For the first time, applicants were asked to demonstrate how their innovation solves a social or environmental problem. This requirement reflects the global pivot towards tech for good and reinforces Scotland's tech industry as a leader in the purpose-driven movement.

"It's more important than ever to use tech as a means to make a difference for the people and planet," said Zoi Kantounatou, Co-founder of FutureX. "We introduced the 'tech for good' criteria in response to that need, and we're thrilled to see the number of quality applications that are utilising technology to create positive change.

The semi-final will be hosted by Johnston Carmichael, Scotland’s largest independent firm of chartered accountants and business advisers, who has joined Startup Summit as a gold sponsor for a third consecutive year.

Without any further ado, the semi-finalists of Startup Summit Competition 2019!

Good-Loop is a disruptive digital media platform which turns ad money into funding for charitable causes, whilst delivering better ROI and capturing valuable permission-based data - in a directly addressable market worth $150bn. The business is only 3 years old but already they are working with global brands like Unilever, Nestle, CocaCola, H&M, Bose and NBCUniversal and have seen 60X y.o.y growth over the last 2 quarters.

With up to a third of child pornography online being generated by children themselves, CensorPic software intelligently and proactively prevents children from being able to take nude photos – stopping production at the source. With funding from Scottish Enterprise, private investment in Edinburgh and a Scottish EDGE win, CensorPic is an innovative tech-start up with the aim of reducing the volume of indecent images of children being produced and entering the public domain.

Desana's app gives you seamless access to a large network of workspace on-demand. They're re-thinking how people move around cities by reducing commutes and the impact on transport infrastructure, while allowing people more opportunity to fit their work around their life, at the touch of a button.

Talking Medicines' purpose is to capture the voice of the patient and reinvent the way that marketing teams in Pharmaceutical companies buy consumer insight about the who, what and why medicines are actually taken. This data is captured through the Medsmart® App and integrated with the company's tagged curated database of real world patient insights.

COHESION has developed a digital ecosystem centred around the citizen, spanning the whole life journey and grounded on core human rights. Their AI-driven technology improves health experiences, seamlessly connecting citizens with services and sciences, making citizens more empowered, services more efficient and sciences more innovative, accelerating population health and precision medicine. Their goal is to make health more affordable, accessible and inclusive by building better health experiences for everyone.

R3 IoT Limited is delivering a remote Internet of Things (IoT) communications service using satellites. This service will enable businesses and industries in remote parts of the world gather data from their assets/operations and make it available online where it is useful. R3 is developing this service aimed at the market niche for IoT in remote locations not adequately served by existing infrastructure, that tackles cost and security fears without compromising ease of implementation and customer experience. They do this by leveraging state of the art IoT and satellite communication technologies.

The WHO estimates that less than 20% of the world’s medical data is available in a form that AI/ML algorithms can ingest and learn from. Decipher Analytics’ ambition is to refine medical data to enable AL/ML approaches to facilitate drug discovery and improve the availability of personalised medicine. Their data refinery platform will improve the quality and increase the amount of data available to speed up the development of new drugs, biomarkers and companion diagnostics. This could help stratify patients and generate personalised medicines informed by our genomes, ensuring patients receive the right medicine, right dose, first time.

Photocert verifies and secures the authenticity of captured pictures and videos to allow businesses to and customers to receive 3rd party trust reciprocally. In an era of misinformation, the credibility of such influential mediums cannot be eroded any further. While technological advancements have contributed to the epidemic of declining trust in pictures and videos, it can also provide solutions. The value in visual information such as pictures and videos is reliant on its relevance and validity. Without our technology, there is a considerable risk to the value they can provide.

They will be pitching in front of our panel of judges on Tuesday 24th September and the finalists will be announced in October. The three finalists will pitch live at Startup Summit on October 30th!

• Initial business consultancy support from Johnston Carmichael
• Recruitment Support from AAI EmployAbility (worth £1,500)

• A fully funded place on the FutureX Silicon Valley Accelerate programme (worth £3,500 + flights + accommodation)
• Initial business consultancy support from Johnston Carmichael
• Recruitment support from AAI EmployAbility (worth £1,500)
• £100,000 from the STV Growth Fund for Marketing (only available to companies registered in Scotland)
• Editorial package from The Herald (worth £20,000)
• Advertising and market analysis package from Dentsu Aegis (worth £2,000)
• $120,000 of IBM Cloud Credits ($10,000 per month for one year)

Join us at Assembly Rooms on October 30th: get your ticket to Startup Summit today!