The Tech Startup Collective

Fresh from a Kickstarter campaign where Beeline raised c$700k (£500k) taking total fundraising to over $1.3m (£1m), Tom, who founded Beeline with good friend and co-founder Mark Jenner in 2015 talks to us about his journey and the trajectory this firm is on. Having had enough of getting lost on their bikes in London, the two former McKinsey employees decided to set up Beeline. Simply put, Beeline offers smart navigation devices for cyclists and bikers. The company helps people have great journeys, by bike and motorbike, through their incredible intuitive navigation hardware, interface and journey planning software. Since founding this startup, Beeline has sold thousands of units around the world, been featured on the BBC and Amazon Originals and has beaten Apple to design awards. Could you guess how much Beeline initially targeted for their Kickstarter? Enjoy the podcast, and listen in to find out.

Jobandtalent has raised over $100m, according to Crunchbase this tech firm was the first on-demand staffing agency that integrates the full process of selecting, hiring and managing within a mobile app. Giuseppe Mozzillo is the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) and he joins us to explore the journey this firm is on. He was one of the key members of the team in the company’s shift towards the staffing model and nowadays he is responsible for managing the sales and marketing operations worldwide. Giuseppe talks frankly about the journey he and the Jobandtalent team have been on since expanding into several international markets. Before working at Jobandtalent, Giuseppe spent 2 years at consulting firm McKinsey in Madrid and was then co-founder of a number of start-ups, among them Exito Gourmet (a cheese manufacturer and distributor in India) and Wimdu (a short holiday rentals platform backed by Rocket Internet). Guisseppe graduated with a bachelor in Business Administration from the Bocconi University in Milan and hold a Masters in International Management from ESADE in Barcelona. Listen on to hear the full podcast.

After receiving $1.5m of funding as recently as June 2018, Laka who offers straightforward bicycle insurance powered by the community, is onto a flyer. In this episode, Tobias talks about his vision of building the mutual insurer of the future and his life as a founder in an emerging InsurTech sector. Tobias founded Laka in 2017, as he states himself "Laka offers an alternative to the existing insurance model. A model where both customer and company wins, aligning interest for the first time" - and this epitomises the ethos of this pioneer InsurTech firm. Laka believes that paying premiums upfront is a bad deal for customers and therefore have turned the traditional concept on its head. With Laka, customers won't pay any premiums upfront, but rather a share of the actual claims cost at the end of the month, up to a clearly communicated personal cap. The cap is not higher than the price of traditional insurance. In turn, if there are no claims, customers won't pay anything. Add to this, Laka's simple policy wording without any excess, depreciation or complicated fine print and you have one hell of a product. Having launched Laka's first product to cover for high value bicycles, from a proof of concept in January 2018 as part of the FCA Sandbox, they have since graduated from it with a full license. Laka was previously on Startup Bootcamp's accelerator, and the $1.5m round was led by Tune Protect Group Berhad (Tune Protect), and Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm 500 Startups, alongside new and existing angel investors from across the insurance industry.

Founded in 2015, David, as Co-Founder of Avvoka stepped into the world of LegalTech after a successful legal career - admittedly through blissful naivety, but also with a passion for disrupting the legal market with contract automation negotiation solutions. The landscape was emerging in the UK around LegalTech and David describes his experiences of making "that" move, and what lessons have been learned when he formed Avvoka. Avvoka is a digital platform enabling businesses to automatically create, e-sign and store contracts online and was built to streamline the process of generating contracts on a mass scale. They are on the "Fuse" Allen and Overy Accelerator recently featured in Forbes, and have raised over £700k in equity investment.

Cosmin Mihaiu noticed that injured patients hated physical therapy — and often took longer to recover because of it — he dedicated himself to making the dreaded process more engaging, or even fun. In 2011 he and his colleagues founded MIRA Rehab, where they develop software that lets patients play interactive, therapeutic games. As MIRA’s CEO and a TED fellow, Mihaiu now focuses on building relationships with medical institutions around the US and the UK, showing them how video games can make recovery more effective for patients and physical therapists alike. MIRA is a software platform designed to make physiotherapy fun and convenient for patients recovering from surgery or injury. The system transforms existing physical therapy exercises into video-games, and uses an external sensor to track and assess patient compliance. MIRA has been featured in the Guardian, Forbes and TED Talks.

Alex Stephany is the Founder and CEO of Beam. Previously, he was the CEO of JustPark where he led what was the largest equity crowdfunding round for a tech startup in history, and is a Board Advisor at JustPark and crowdfunding platform, Spacehive. Alex is the author of the leading business on the sharing economy, The Business of Sharing. Alex was inspired to build Beam after meeting and getting to know Richard, an illiterate homeless man who wanted to learn to read. He asked himself: "Would any local people be prepared to help this man learn to read, if technology existed that made it easy and safe?” At Beam, they believe the answer is 'yes', and that it is possible to use technology to solve a range of large complex social problems, starting with homelessness. Beam is the world's first crowdfunding platform that helps homeless people to train up and get into work. Beam has been named by The Guardian as one of the most important social tech innovations of 2018.