Image: © pauchi/Stock.adobe.com
LaunchBox 2022 winners Ecode will receive a cash prize and co-working space at Dogpatch Labs to further the business.
Ecode, a circular fashion communication platform, has been named the winner of LaunchBox 2022. LaunchBox is the annual accelerator programme for student entrepreneurs at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
Ecode was founded by TCD students Elise Vens, Emmet Lowry and Nathan Gaborieau. Their business idea is a circular fashion communication platform designed to help consumers to make more informed, sustainable decisions when they are shopping for clothes.
The winners of Launchbox 2022. Image: Tangent
The trio’s business was one of 10 student start-ups that took part in this year’s LaunchBox accelerator. LaunchBox is managed by Tangent, TCD’s workspace for ideas and innovation, and provides students with mentorship, funding and access to investors.
This year’s 10 participants had to pitch for funding support at the accelerator’s demo day last Friday (2 September). The student entrepreneurs came from nine different TCD schools.
As well as Ecode, winners on the day included Imprint Esports, Givedish and Netsso. They will all receive cash prizes, as well as co-working space to further their businesses at Dogpatch Labs.
Imprint Esports, which came in second place, aims to help e-sports teams hire more successful players by providing an enterprise platform for analysing e-sports player performance data.
In joint-third place were Givedish and Netsso. Givedish provides a ‘get a dish, give a dish’ model to allow consumers to vote with their actions in the fight to end food poverty locally and globally. Netsso enables clients to streamline the information requesting process during corporate transactions on an encrypted cloud platform.
Over the years, LaunchBox has provided a jumping off point for many successful Irish businesses. These include Touchtech Payments, which was acquired Stripe in 2019, and Equine MediRecord, which recently raised more than €10m to expand globally.
Last year’s LaunchBox winner, Field of Vision, recently scooped the award for Inclusive Innovation at Invent 2022. The start-up uses AI tech to make live sport accessible for people with visual impairments.
Gavan Drohan, head of entrepreneurship at Tangent, said that TCD is known “as a community of innovators” and this reputation is “undoubtedly sustained thanks in no small part to LaunchBox”.
Tangent’s CEO, Ken Finnegan, added that the importance of agility and innovation “has never been more necessary and important than in the current climate”.
Finnegan recently reflected on the importance of supporting student entrepreneurs like the Ecode team.
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