InnovationRCA Start-ups Raise More than £1 Million

Four start-ups from the Royal College of Art’s incubator, InnovationRCA, have collectively raised over £1 million in 2014, marking a milestone in both the development of their businesses and in the College's incubation strategy.

BuffaloGrid, CuprisHealth, Ikawa and YossarianLives! are four of the incubator's start-ups to have won grants and awards from angel investors and organisations including the Technology Strategy Board, totalling more than £1 million.

The funding comes at a pivotal time for BuffaloGrid, which has developed portable small charging units for power generation in off-grid regions; for Ikawa, which has developed a digital coffee-roasting appliance; for YossarianLives!, which has devised a smart search engine to support new ideas in the creative industries; and for CuprisHealth – smartphone-enabled clinical devices that connect directly to a web-based platform allowing immediate transmission of clinical information between healthcare practitioners and patients.

Director of InnovationRCA Dr Nadia Danhash said: ‘Start-ups incubated through InnovationRCA are winning awards and pushing boundaries with the tools, services and systems that change the way we live, work and play. For such young start-ups to win such a significant amount of competitive Technology Strategy Board funding is testament to their strength – and to the value that being mentored by InnovationRCA adds.’

The RCA start-ups have been gaining wider recognition in recent months. Buffalo Grid has been billed as one of the top ten most innovating businesses in the UK by SMARTA100, and earlier this month, was selected as one of the winners of Virgin’s Three New Things’ competition. As part of the prize, Buffalo Grid will have mentoring sessions with Sir Richard Branson. Meanwhile, YossarianLives! has just signed its first customer – a London ad agency.

Separately, last November, RCA incubatee Loowatt Ltd secured a £600,000-plus grant to expand its pioneering waterless toilet systems in Madagascar and Sub-saharan Africa from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations  programme. The award is now funding a sizeable expansion of the Loowatt project in needy urban areas, enabling the company to test its technology and business model in Madagascar with the goal of having 100 Loowatt waterless toilets in use over the next two years, serving at least 3,000 customers.