Auckland 2015

Auckland’s inaugural Lightning Lab cohort was made up of 9 teams, 26 individuals, and 12 lab techs from all over New Zealand.

The programme received the support of more than 100 mentors over the 12 week duration, who worked alongside the teams to help develop their ideas into investible companies with global potential. Mentors from 2015 included Miles Valentine, Andy Lark, Claudia Batten, and Ben Kepes.

Throughout the process teams had access to an amazing range of local and international speakers.  With 10 international speakers, and 25 local speakers, there were a total 65 hours of speaker sessions.

After 12 weeks of hard startup slog, Lightning Lab 2015 showcased its 9 tech startups at their Demo Day on June 4th. The event attracted more than 200 NZ-based and international investors, as well as various media channels, mentors, alumni, and supporters from the entrepreneurial community. Over 400 attendees RSVP’d for the final Demo Day, filling the venue to capacity. As well as this, an extra 600 people viewed the demo day through live-streaming from 11 different countries.  Investors expressed interest of up to $1.4M on the night of Demo Day.

Having now launched their companies, the 9 teams are now looking to work with investors to accelerate their growth further on the path to success.

BrokerBetter is using software to transforms Advisory firms into self sustaining profit engines that generate a significant portion of new business through referrals, mainly leveraging off their current clients and business networks.

Designer Wardrobe knows that women & fashion are the perfect match -but what happens to the 80% of a typical woman’s closet that is literally just taking up space? Until now -clearing your closet of unused items has been too hard & taken too long. The team at Designer Wardrobe have changed that by creating a social marketplace for like-minded women to buy, sell & rent designer fashion with each other. We are seeing rapid growth & exciting amount of engagement with our social features.

Future Insight have created data mining algorithms that find correlations between all the variables in large datasets automatically. It is a hypothesis-free way of deriving insights without needing to know what you are looking for.

Justly is a cloud SaaS app that puts the lawyer and client on the same page through a secure online portal where they can collaborate on the production of legal solutions.

Logicore Logicoreare the creators of Fringe –a SaaS modular designed solution that brings visibility, action and control to the indirect spend of large companies and enterprise organisations. Fringe refers to the peripheral or ‘fringe’ indirect expenses that up to 70% of organisations struggle to visualise and control -for example fleet, freight and travel. Our team is made up of passionate Fringe experts, with a wealth of experience around enterprise procurement, operations, business process improvement and technology development.

Preno is developed by a hotelier for hoteliers, because of a need to help operators better compete in a increasingly complex market.

Roll was developed to streamline a creative businesses internal process and solve a massive problem in the sector that has been clearly validated by extensive market research and customer development.

Tomato is the app that makes catching up with the friends you want to super easy. In this digital age, social platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp are the main channels where friends catch up.

Wearit is an online/mobile social platform where reals girls can personally suggest clothes to real guys in a fun and engaging way.