KPMG Best British Tech Pioneer competition 2020

Bina Mehta, Partner, and Tim Kay, Director of Enterprise at KPMG UK last night announced the winner of the Best British Tech Pioneer 2020 competition which was won by VIVIDQ, a deep tech software company with world-leading expertise in 3D holography. Rajesh Agrawal, Deputy Mayor of London for Business, welcomed over 200 guests to the event at City Hall on Thursday 13th February 2020 with Kevin Smith, Partner, Chairman for London region and Specialist in International Trade at KPMG UK welcoming guests to the seventh year of the competition.

Since launching BBTP in 2013, this annual competition has been propelling forward the game changers, the disruptors and tech titans of tomorrow. BBTP finalists receive an incredible opportunity to profile their businesses to senior corporate decision makers, investors and the media.All six finalists will be invited to join KPMG at the Web Summit in Lisbon in November. Web Summit is one of the largest tech conferences in the world with over 70,000 attendees attending from across the globe.

The six finalists were:

ClinSpec Diagnsotics Ltd have developed the world’s first cost effective blood test for brain cancer and it is our mission to be a world leader in blood analysis using artificial intelligence for early detection of cancers and other diseases.

Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd creates and supplies Vertical Farms for indoor agriculture and Grid Platforms for commercial property.

Navenio their primary mission is to transform hospitals globally by enabling healthcare teams to be in the right place, at the right time. Using our University of Oxford originated technology, we create compelling location-based services…with no need for investment in infrastructure.

Perlego is a disruptive technology for a broken academic publishing industry, on a mission to make educational material accessible for all. While students in the UK can spend on average >£400 per year on their textbooks, Perlego gives its readers access to the entire digital library for only £12 per month.

Rovco is an innovative subsea technology company headquartered in Bristol, UK with offices in Aberdeen and partnerships in Taiwan, Malaysia and Egypt. Rovco is changing the face of the subsea industry, leading in areas of the subsea technology market, and becoming the number one organisation for ROV 3D computer vision technologies and applied artificial intelligence underwater.

VIVIDQ is a deep tech software company with world-leading expertise in 3D holography. The company was founded in 2017 by a team of expert engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and St Andrews, who solved key technology barriers in the adoption of holographic display.

About the Founders of VIVIDQ

Darran Milne
Co-Founder & CEO

Darran is a co-founder and CEO at VividQ. His extensive experience in commercialising software products has been key to VividQ’s rapid growth. A Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist by training, Darran pivoted from academia to become a leading analyst at a large financial software company. There he led new development initiatives and managed client implementation projects.

As one of the co-founders of VividQ and its former CTO, he directed the original research and development efforts and initiated partner collaborations. As CEO, he heads the company’s technical and commercial strategies, establishing VividQ as the underlying software provider for holographic display. Darran holds a PhD in quantum information theory and quantum optics from the University of St Andrews and the Max Planck Institute.

Aleksandra Pedraszewska
Co-Founder & COO

Aleksandra is a co-founder and COO at VividQ. She is a certified project manager and a graduate of Cambridge Judge Business School. Before joining VividQ’s founding team, she gained professional experience at Rolls-Royce, HBO, and an investment fund IdeaLab Ventures.

At VividQ, Aleks established the company’s commercial office in London. Today, she leads the sales and marketing efforts and manages day to day operations. She focuses on taking VividQ’s software to the market with pioneering hardware manufacturers and chipmakers, and on maintaining investor relations.

She was named on the ”25 under 25″ lists by Forbes & McKinsey, and London Tech London Advocates and won the WinTechSeries “Rising Star” award in 2019.

Dr Andrzej Kaczorowski
Co-Founder & CTO

Andrzej is a co-founder and CTO at VividQ. He has an interdisciplinary scientific background. He holds a PhD and MRes in Photonics Systems Development from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Physics and Computer Science from King’s College London.

His near decade of research experience in the field of holography laid the foundations of VividQ’s technology. Andrzej led proof of principle work which resulted in VividQ’s core algorithm and the patent submission. These findings established VividQ’s efficient algorithms enabling real-time hologram generation.

Andrzej has published several papers on holography and is a frequent speaker at academic and popular science conferences and events. He has spoken at EPIC, Science. Polish Perspectives and TEDxWarsaw amongst others.

Tom Durrant
Co-Founder & CDO

Tom Durrant is a co-founder and CDO at VividQ. He oversees product development and delivery, with the aim of bringing holography to ubiquitous commercial applications. His work on real-time hologram generation procedures ranges from low-level algorithm development to architecture and data pipelines.

Tom is a graduate of the University of Cambridge with a masters in Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science with Distinction from the University of Oxford. He has development experience from Roke Manor Research and HP Autonomy, and has been a supervisor of computational projects at the University of Cambridge.

He continues to steer the development team toward innovative, agile practices, facilitating the integration of new research ideas generated at VividQ into well engineered software products.

The 16 companies who got through to the semi-final event which took place in February, 2020
Semi-finalists:

Cyan Forensics helps law enforcement, social media, and cloud providers find and block harmful content from paedophiles and terrorists. The award winning, cutting edge, digital forensics tool’s application by law enforcement was described by the UK Home Secretary as “game changing technology”, helping evidence be found on computers in minutes and replacing processes that currently take may hours.

DIOSYNVAX Ltd (Digitally designed, Immune Optimised and Synthesized Vaccines) is a new platform technology that will significantly accelerate vaccine development and achieve dramatic improvements to the protection against emerging and re-emerging pathogens.

For Good Causes empowering people to use previously inaccessible sources of funds to support the specific charities closest to their heart and give consumer brands new ways to emotionally engage existing and new customer bases around themes they already care about.

Hark enterprise IoT software for Connectivity, Visibility and Intelligence. We capture and monitor data in real-time for a variety of different sectors transforming operations through intelligent technology.

Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd creates and supplies Vertical Farms for indoor agriculture and Grid Platforms for commercial property.

Konsentus is a hosted API call to provide identification validation and fraud prevention in the PSD2 Open Banking channel by checking the identity and regulatory status in real-time of Third Party Providers who are in possession of consent from account holders to access the account holders’ financial data.

Membr is a cloud-based fitness management solution that provides an all-in-one gym software platform for fitness clubs and currently powers gyms across 20 countries with nearly 2 million exercisers. We assist fitness professionals scale their knowledge in a way that is cost effective for the consumer and time efficient for the trainer, serving as an example that a good member engagement plan can help as much commercially as it can from a fitness perspective.

Mind Of My Own Ltd create fully accessible apps that provide a unique digital solution to advancing universal children’s rights ensuring their voices are heard by the right people in a way and at a time that suits them.

The Tribe Project (by Bronze Labs) the mission of The Tribe Project is to directly address national care inequality. Through combining machine learning centred technology and decades of community development experience Tribe closes national care “dark patches” where care provision has failed.

Wotch.io a new improved and fairer video-sharing platform that puts Creators first. With tremendous momentum at the moment: a successful beta with over 100k downloads/trending 3rd on Google Play/trending 3rd on iOS.

Yellow Line Parking Ltd (AppyWay) digitises the kerb, creating a dynamic source of power for local authorities & businesses by creating the largest standardised digital twin of the UK’s kerbside; placing government back in the centre of cities and monetising their existing assets in a new way.

For further information visit https://www.kpmgenterprise.co.uk/bbtp/