This time a week ago, Alison Berryman, Anthony Purvis and I were getting ready to attend the Mass Challenge UK Finalist event.
Mass Challenge, if you haven’t had the chance to become acquainted with it yet, is the world’s largest start-up accelerator. Launched and head quartered in Boston in 2009. This year it launched in the UK.
Mass Challenge’s vision is to foster a “start-up renaissance” built on businesses which are “creating new value”. Broadly put, there is an emphasis on inventing and making, as well as social impact. All of which is a very exciting place for an intellectual property lawyer.
We’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate all of the Mass Challenge UK 2015 Finalists. Several of the UK finalists have invented products which may prove life saving innovations in healthcare and/or life sciences but there are others which are just neat ideas that you know you would want to use.
To qualify to be a finalist each of the entrepreneurs and/or companies were judged both on paper and in “Dragon’s Den” style pitch presentations.
Our highlights from the 80 strong pack of finalists is below:
Alison’s winners
Alison Berryman, our Head of Technology and Commercial law, was a judge for one of the “Dragon’s Den” rounds. She was particularly delighted to see that three of the businesses that had pitched for her had got through, they were:
All three of these draw together creative and technology businesses, enabling their users to develop and maximise returns.
Life sciences and biotechnology companies
Of those finalists focussed on healthcare technology there were two examples particularly sprang out for me:
It was also great to see a client of Waterfront, Shoot, get into the finalists. One regret, we didn’t get to try on VisualWise’s virtual reality headset. Next time!
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