Plug and Play is a venture capital firm and start up accelerator. It provides a platform for business growth. It is famously know to be an early investor in google, paypal and dropbox.
Nedbank with Plug and Play will for the first time be doing programs in South Africa. The mission is to find and connect 10 entrepreneurs across the world and business leaders at The Disruption Agenda which was held in September 2018.
The ten company startups were invited to join this program for the purpose of exploration of the ideas and the response within the business community, to engage in innovative ideas of participants. Nedbank relationship with Plug and Play is unique and an interesting one that is meant to find best global entrepreneurs. The Disruption Agenda carries African and global start up in every sector of expertise. For the past two years it was sponsored by FinTech.
Startups Chosen for The Disruption Agenda
- Koniku: The direction of the startup is making living machines using synthetic biology. The idea is to manufacture machines that can notice and detect fake food, design taste, detect explosives, infectious diseases, cancer, etc. Koniku has a premise that Bio is Tech™. The company uses proteins on living cells to find solutions related to accomplishing their vision. The production of microchip that is a living organism is the future and Koniku will be well positioned for such.
- Airware: The Company specializes in drone analytics, it assists other companies and institutions purchase or invest in advanced tech such as drones, cloud computing machine learning, etc. the company also helps in site management for increased production or productivity. It has the capabilities to capture aerial data for business purposes.
- Sentiance: The company studies sensor data to best understand human behavior and context. This information is captured for clients for to originate solutions based products and services that makes the Internet of Things (IoT) into the Internet of You the individual. The spheres of information captured and studies covers marketing, commerce, smart mobility, connected health, smart home, smart city and connected car.
- LifeQ: Human physiology and systems biology is the core focus of the company. Its mission is to select, capture and present meaningful individual digital biomarkers from various curated data sources. LifeQ is one of the world-leading science and technology company. It concentrates on high-value personalized health information and derives solutions that would otherwise be costly or inaccessible due to old fashion mechanisms. It delivers services for use by individuals, businesses, and clinical providers at a reasonable price cost.
- Wasteless: The company has produced a machine that tracks groceries stores product pricing and expiration date in real time. It’s a world first; the machine also has learning capacity. The machine tracks products at the item level. This will also benefit e-commerce, knowing as to which products need to be topped up in real time and will illuminate to waste.
- Trueface AI: Trueface computer vision solutions is designed to track any camera feed and translate it to information and capture data of any person of interest, items and objects too. Trueface AI has advanced facial recognition software and spoof detection. It provides an API, location to on-premise solution and a no-code solution for identity management. Part of Trueface mission is to focuses on unique security solutions for its clients.
- Aerobotics: The company is out to assist farmers globally. Its tech is based around drone and satellite data to help eradicate in pest and disease management for crops. The drone is liked with an App. The software is made to recognize potential troubles in orchards and plant threatening problems. Farmers are able to access information on every individual tree planted. So far Aerobotics reports its success with over 6 million trees and counting.
- What3Words: What3Words is location detector with precision built for universal address. With this system, the global map is divided into a grid of 3m x 3m squares. Each square is assigned a unique 3-word address making global addressing precise.
- Dispel: Dispel makes cloaking technology. This serves the purpose of security from cyber-attacks. The infrastructure is concealed and makes it difficult for illegal cyber entry. This is done through network-level Moving Target Defense: an orchestrated mass-virtualization and encryption technology meant to disrupt unwanted actions. Governments internationally and Banks will benefit greatly from this technological advancement.
- nxt: IoT.nxt has come up with framework poised for efficient, cost savings and increased revenue from IoT (Internet of Things). The program comes with development of business for the Internet of Things strategy with little disruption to current operations.
The IoT.nxt framework is that the solution is technology-agnostic. It can help digitize any industry, any system and any process.
The founder of Koniku, a neurocomputation company is Nigerian who is now based in Berkeley in the US.
Africa has potential to be one of the leaders in IT. Plug and Play with Nedbank they are providing such platforms. Moving the continent into the future.