Member Article

24 year-old Leeds graduate entrepreneur secures £325k seed funding for tech startup

24 year-old Universiy of Leeds graduate entrepreneur Corbyn Munnik has been able to secure £325k seed investment for his company Sliide, which allows brands to advertise on people’s phone’s locked screens.

The Sliide smartphone application, also founded by Frankie Kearney COO, and Paul Johnston CTO, distributes brands’ content relevant to its users, and shares the advertising value with them.

Independent firms give Sliide users exclusive deals and users are entered into cash prizes every Friday.

They have officially launched the app last week, the first mobile app in the UK that utilises lock screen real estate to curate content. It’s a good way for retailers and retail brands to reach out to their customers.

The lock screen startup has already raised £325k ($490,000) in seed investment.

Sliide is also part of UK Trade & Investment’s Sirius Programme, which supports entrepreneurs and their ideas with funding, mentorship.

Sirius has 184 international graduate entrepreneurs across 68 teams setting up their businesses in the UK.

24 year-old, founder and CEO, Corbyn Munnik says: “We’ve seen lock screen start-ups before, but Sliide prides its self on discovery, matching your interests with location and time to give you information as and when you want it.

“ You may be thinking it’s an impossible task to give you something relevant every time you unlock, but Sliide realises that.

“On sign up users are asked to choose their preferred lock screen when there is nothing of hyper relevance.”

Eric Newnham, serial entrepreneur of the year, CEO of Talon Outdoor and chairman of Blis Media said: “What I like about Sliide is the ability to easily build a direct relationship with a person through their device by serving smart personalised communications which they in turn can choose to take further.

“There are many challenges ahead for the team but Sliide seems to address some of the desires that advertisers have to give rich content to people via their mobile devices.”

Commenting on Sliide, Steve Clarke, who has just sold his mobile advertising company to Omnicom says: “Utilizing redundant real estate has worked so many times in the past, Giant Media with Scaffolding, Amazon with the KindleFire etc – why not this time I ask myself.

“I’m interested to see if their engagement rate of 14.68% is maintained with a larger data set.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clare Burnett .