Wellington 2014

The 2014 class was made up of ten teams and 35 entrepreneurs. It was selected from a wide range of applications from all over New Zealand and places as far flung as Ukraine, Vietnam and New York.

This class received the support of more than 50 mentors during the programme, who tirelessly worked to coach, teach and develop them into the promising young ventures we saw pitch on stage during Demo Day. Mentors from 2014 included Suse Reynolds, Steve O’Connor, Amanda Santos, John Holt and Trevor Dickinson.

Teams lived and breathed not just their own startup world each day, but the highs and lows of the entire Lightning Lab cohort. From bouncing ideas off other founders to sleeping in the lab or taking a mental break together over drinks, a new type of family was quickly formed over the three months.

After 12 weeks of blood sweat and tears, Lightning Lab 2014 concluded with Demo Day on 28 May. The investment event attracted more than 100 NZ-based and international investors, as well as various media channels, mentors, alumni, and supporters from the entrepreneurial community. Attending investors were ecstatic to discover new ventures in “Silicon Welly” they can get behind.

Five of the ten teams have received seed investment commitments since Demo Day totalling $2.2 million. These teams are CoachSeek, CommonLedger, Cloud Cannon, Glassjar and Twingl. Of the teams that did not receive funding, four decided to move on to other pursuits and one is continuing to bootstrap as a team.

Glassjar and Cloud Cannon are both currently in San Francisco, where they hope to gain further support, investment and partners as well as officially enter the US market in the coming months. Twingl and Mish Guru are based in Wellington and the Coachseek team is in Auckland working out of the Movers & Shakers space at the Britomart.

CloudCannon is the easiest way for web designers to deploy, host and maintain websites for clients. It doesn’t require any programming and fits in with the web designer’s existing workflow.

Coachseek helps sports coaches manage their business better. Simple and easy to use, it helps coaches with all their scheduling, billing, messaging and client management. We take all the admin pain away so sports coaches can do more of what they love!

Glassjar is a software platform for managing shared expenses and making group payments. It has been launched to the rental market to help tenants create group accounts that are able to pay for all shared expenses, without the need to use cheques.

CommonLedger is a universal translator of accounting data, making accountants’ software and compliance easy.

MishGuru makes it easy for brands and agencies to manage Snapchat™ accounts.

Twingl’s mission is to accelerate the evolution of human intelligence: they build tools that make thinking visible. Twingl is starting in education with their first product, Trailblazer, which makes learning visible. Trailblazer is a browser for students to do online research. It replaces browser tabs with a map that helps students navigate the web, and helps teachers teach students how to learn.

Floc is a smartphone app that utilizes urban cellphone data to build predictive models around how hospitality operators will be affected by pedestrian traffic over a given time-frame such as the next few hours, or days.

Keen spontaneous matching people to shared activities.

Cogo is a lightweight knowledge management system for SMEs. It integrates with the tools employees already use, allowing them to easily retain knowledge: making it searchable, accessible, and durable.

WaterGenie is an cloud-connected water monitor for the millions of homes and businesses that store water in tanks.