Embarking on Entrepreneurship

Following a competitive application process, ten early-stage companies were selected to join Southampton Science Park’s Catalyst business accelerator spring programme.

Catalyst Founder and Science Park CEO, Peter Birkett, commented: “After a challenging selection process, I am delighted with the potential of the businesses and the quality of the founders that have joined our new Catalyst programme. From the very first team workshop, the enthusiasm and energy in the room has been palpable!”

The successful companies are revealed as:

• Brytlyt: empowering organisations through transformational data analytics.
• CanSense: developing blood-based assays for faster, more accurate cancer screening.
• FoodKim: enabling children and their parents to manage severe food allergies in real time.
• Forty1 Kitesurfing: reinventing kitesurfing with a low cost, portable hydrofoil.
• Fostering Guide: developing a national online fostering matching and application service.
• ManFen EdTech: gamifying language learning for better outcomes using artificial intelligence.
• Nub: creating a scalable platform for more effective, unified business communications.
• Quadible: innovating online privacy through easier, more secure authentication.
• Truckstars: working to overcome a significant shortage of HGV drivers.
• Wilderness Now: creating a unified marketplace for outdoor adventures.  

More detailed profiles of each of these businesses, detailing the societal issues that they hope to solve and how they plan to do this, will appear in subsequent news updates.

Catalyst is an intensive programme of high-level mentoring and commercially focused peer group workshops designed to turn great ideas into businesses with real world impacts. It has been extended to run three times each year with the aim of supporting many more early-stage businesses in the south of England. The next programme will commence in September 2019.

https://www.science-park.co.uk/grow/start-up/catalyst