7 North East teams announced to join the latest Ignite Accelerator programme

Ignite Accelerator has announced the seven teams that will be joining its upcoming global Accelerator programme and which have all been identified as “scalable companies”.

The teams will receive bespoke investment coaching, support from entrepreneurs who have previously raised millions in investment, and a trip to meet investors and founders in San Francisco.

The accelerator is one of a series of Ignite programmes funded by the North of Tyne Combined Authority to help founders in the North East of England launch and scale their ventures.

The teams are:

1. Fabric Academy is an online marketing training academy which “empowers the most ambitious marketers to thrive”. The company was founded by Lisa Eaton who has over 20 years of experience building marketing strategies.
2. Grid Finder helps racers find racing. Founded by Tom Bunten, with help from CTO Nikhil Patel, the company helps online racing communities to find their place on the grid.
3. Peek Home helps homeowners preview the potential of their home “at the click of a button”. Founded by Roland and Jaemi Glancy, the company provides professionally designed sketch plans to customers within days, for a fraction of the price of a traditional architect.
4. Rapid Fluidics aims to shape the future of Microfluidics, by offering design consultancy and rapid prototyping for devices that move or analyse tiny amounts of liquid. Founded by Paul Marshall, Rapid Fluidics helps lower the cost of medical diagnostic devices, produce faster results, and provide more control over experiments.
5. Rove helps developers integrate their services with third party health/fitness data using just one line of code. Founded by Alex Ventisei and Will Rogers, Rove is set out to make launching and running health and fitness apps much easier for others.
6. Turbinia measures modified proteins. Founded by Will Dracup, Turbinia has the potential to disrupt the medical industry by writing software for proteins. Will previously founded Biosignatures which raised £3.5m.
7. Wordnerds helps large B2C organisations “genuinely” understand their customers and employees across all of their different channels without word clouds or abstract sentiment scores. Wordnerds was founded by Steve Erdal and Pete Daykin and has now grown to a team of 18.

Jo York, programme manager at Ignite, commented: “With over 50 applications, it was incredibly difficult for us to select the successful teams. But I think we’ve ended up with a really good mix, and I’m looking forward to working with all the founders.

“The seven companies that were successful in applying operate in a range of industries, from research-driven biotech to architecture and practical marketing. So it’s a real mix, which will contribute to the sharing of knowledge between peers and alumni. We’ve seen this ‘cohort effect’ make a real difference in previous Ignite programmes.”

By Matthew Neville – Correspondent, Bdaily

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