Germinate 8 is set to go
The selection bootcamp is over, the judges have spoken, the agreements are finally signed and ilab are now able to announce the successful startups for ilab’s 8th Germinate accelerator.
As always, the process is at the same time extremely rewarding – experiencing all of the passion, the ideas, the enthusiasm to make an impact and the variety so evident at bootcamp – and difficult – choosing startups from a group of founders all personally driven to forge a new path and make a difference.
The 3 day Germinate 8 selection bootcamp was awesome with some fantastic growth and pitch progression that occurred across the weekend. 28 teams were shortlisted with close to 60 founders participating.
In the end, the five selected teams who will all benefit from the ilab’s eighth Germinate accelerator program are:
Agalytics – Agalytics provides a rapid and cost-effective solution for infield soil and crop nutrient testing, for smarter decisions in agriculture.
AirSponge – A service that will get your car washed wherever you are, at whatever time and price you want by people who want to wash it. The founders were winners of the recent Brisbane Startup Weekend for Women held earlier this year organised by Blue Sky and River City Labs
Reinventing Divorce Team – A tablet-based app to guide couples through a cooperative process to reach an equitable court-sanctioned divorce settlement. This team is tackling a sensitive and often fraught to build …
Vet Suite Technologies – Pet Connect digitally records key patient data while simultaneously providing real time updates on pets to worried parents. To date, pet owners have often been badly served in terms of information flow for the and Pet Connect seeks to fix that problem.
50DMC – A social hub of musicians, video / music producers and their supporters merging production fundraising, commissioning and management.
From a demographic point of view, this founding cohort is a wonderful mix of gender, of age, of backgrounds cultures and of ideas. The personal and product growth that occurs with this mix and mashing of people and different thinking is a crucial benefit of any accelerator and one that ilab has witnessed time and again through our support of over 100 startups over the past 3 years.
It was also pleasing to see the selection of a Startup Weekend winner. This was actually an exceptional result. Startup Weekend participants typically do not have enough history and validation to be selected into Germinate. We were delighted to make an exception for AirSponge who have continued to demonstrate great execution and customer growth following the weekend.
The selection of Agalytics also continued a theme of including startups with hardware / IoT aspects into ilab’s programs following the likes of RedBack Technologies, MOVUS and HSK Instruments. Agalytics is absolutely playing to Australia’s strengths in agricultural innovation.
Adding to this will be the social / legal impacts by Reinventing Divorce, the pet tech meets client service from Vet Suite and the collaborative music hub delivered through 50DMC. There will be many interesting times ahead for this group. They will get some tech help however ..
ilab’s Tech Intern program in overdrive with 7 new interns supporting startups
The need for tech skills to support the growing new economies and startups has never been better understood than it is today. As a response to this, ilab has created its Tech Intern program where we source smart tech undergrads with the right skills and the right attitudes to participate with startups at the ground floor. This year, ilab will be hosting 7 tech interns from The University of Queensland with coding and engineering backgrounds. They will get to deliver real outcomes for their startups, including the new Germinate 8 cohort, and will hopefully get addicted to taste of seeing their tech skills making real change in the world.
