On 6th December 2016, Frog Valley organised its first pitching event Pitch My Wallet where we invited 5 start-ups to present in front of 4 investors. Our event was hosted by our partner Capco and sponsored by Workshopr and French Radio London. In addition we had a fantastic audience of 65 people. Each start-up had 5 minutes to present their business, followed by a Q&A from the investors and the audience. Typically the questions raised by the investors were related to, what problem are you trying to solve?, What is the solution? What is your product? What is your market and its size?, who are your competitors? And what is your value added proposition?

On the investors panel we had the chance to have:

Nadim Lahoud from Oxford Capital. Oxford Capital are a London-based venture capital investor in UK digital tech focused on Seed and Series-A stage investments

Alexandre Covello and Candice Lemaitre from AngelsCube. AngelsCube is one of London’s leading investment led startup accelerators.

Raimonda Jankunaite from CrowdVelocity. CrowdVelocity is a  platform for entrepreneurs, early adopters and project leaders working together in groups

On the start-up side, we had a fantastic mixed of European people representing their company. Milingual is Spanish, Worapay is originally from Lithuanian, Trackener and Findoc were representing France and  Russia for Lobster.

To start with Milingual, they are a social language learning platform that aims to create and organize language activities and events at some of the city’s best bars, cafes and social venues. It’s a great platform to help students learn and practice languages of their choice in a relaxed manner, meeting and interacting with teachers in a great environment.

Milingual was created early 2015 in Spain and they already have over 6.000 students, 200 teachers and 50 venues over there.

They are now at a stage of expanding internationally and as a first international market to open they have chosen the UK. To support this expansion they are seeking to raise £350.000 to sustain and grow for the next 12 months.

Following their presentation, the investors questioned Milingual around: what make them different from a dating website or again what make them different from Meetup. To which they answered that their identity is purely around learning languages.

Gabriel from Milingual

The second start-up to present was Findoc. Findoc is an online platform that allows patients to search, compare and book a healthcare specialist within a few clicks, 24/7 from any devices. The market targeted is actually for people who do not have access to the NHS and currently represent £34m, 400.000 doctors, 2m overnight calls per annum being self payed.

The platform allow patient to select doctors based on specialisation, location and rating.

The MVP was released 2 month ago and Findoc has already been successful in having 100 appointments booked, 2000 specialists listed and 105 payment subscribers registering.

Findoc is looking at raising £450.000 for 12 months to be spent towards customer acquisition.

The panel of investors and the audience challenged Findoc with questions around regulations and how can they ensure that the doctors registered on their platform are “real”. Some in the audience have commented that there is a real market for it.

Xavier from Findoc

Then Trackener presented their original idea to monitor horse behaviour. The market represents 58m horses globally comprising of 1million in the UK alone. The equestrian market represents £168m in the UK. Trackener helps you detect and prevent health problems, and optimise every aspect of your horse’s life by learning from their behaviour. Trackener places sensors on the horses that allow identifying problems as they occur in real time. Trackener is a startupbootcamp company.

They are forecasting a revenue of £300K for 2017, £2m for 2018 and £4m for 2019.

Trackener would like to raise £500.000 to invest in marketing, hardware and software.

Comments from the investors suggested that there is definitely a market for it, however some competitors are already established and it would definitely be a competitive market.

Pauline from Trackener

The next one to pitch was then WoraPay who is a unique mobile services company which enables individuals to pay for items without needing to queue at a point of sale terminal. User experiences include Order and Pay, Shop and Pay, Eat and Pay. For now, Worapay works predominantly with large Entreprise companies who have on site cafes. Current analyses are showing that at peak hour, people are queuing on average 14mn for their coffee. Since they have been using it, some retailers have seen their sale increasing by 5%.

Worapay was born 3 years ago in the Baltics where they already have over 6.000 clients, 900.000 users and they partner with Lloyds Bank, Mastercard and Zapper.

In 2015, they moved their HQ to the UK and are located at startupbootcamp.

Worapay is looking at raising £1m as a final round of seeds funding. Prior to that, they have raised £400.000 over the past 3 years.

Questions and comments from the investors related to their value proposition in a payment technology market that is highly competitive and also understanding their business model.

Richard from Worapay

Our final start-up presenting their concept was Lobster. Lobster is a platform which enables brands, agencies and the media to licence visual content directly from social media users. Using pioneering AI tech, it trawls through the main social networks (Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Vk, YouTube, Vimeo), along with several of the largest cloud storage providers. Billions of affordable images and videos in an instant – live, unusual and so much more authentic than stock.

Lobster started in 2013 and in 2016 they completed seed round of £300K, represented 4m photos, 15.000 contributors.

They have 3 models for the buyers:

• Single transactions
• Subscriptions
• API integration

The contributors take 75% of the revenue generated by sharing photos and videos.

Lobster’s revenue has been doubling month on month for the past few months and now  they would like to raise £1m to develop sales and marketing in the US, to increase the customer subscription growth, to boost the AI and curation technology, API sales and monthly recurring revenue.

Lobster received some positive feedback from the investors who asked questions related to the competition and the technology behind Lobster.

Olga from Lobster

Overall, the event was a success. From the investors’ viewpoint, they were pleased with the quality of the start-ups presenting, some have expressed their interest investing in a couple of them already and some would be interested in participating again to our event. From the start-ups viewpoint, they were pleased to be given the opportunity to pitch to raise funds. From the crowd viewpoint, everyone was pleased with the quality of the investors judging and start-ups presenting, the venue is great and the momentum throughout the event was very well managed. From a team perspective, we have learnt a lot in terms of finding start-ups who are at the right stage of growth for our event. It was certainly the most challenging part but we feel now more equipped to bring other rounds of great startups.

Whether you are a startup looking at raising funds, an investor watching for the next unicorn or simply interested in our event, do not hesitate to email us events@frogvalley.net.