Flubit, an e-commerce start-up that uses cookies to discover better discounts online for shoppers, has emerged as the overall winner at the London Web Summit Start-up Contest. Irish social media security company Trustev came in as one of the four finalists.
After an intense set of final presentations, Old Street-based Flubit was declared the winner.
Flubit co-founder and CEO Bertie Stephens commented: “From the very beginning we had nine people who risked everything and now we have 35 people who are risking a lot, and thanks to the Web Summit we’ve kick started our journey.”
Flubit follow in the footstephs of SmartThings who won the previous startup competition in Dublin and Seedrs who won the competition at the London Web Summit last year. Both have gone on to raise over $2m.
Flubit win a generous bundle of services from Microsoft, Hiscox Insurance, iSeed and 99 Designs.
London Web Summit co-organiser Paddy Cosgrave says: “The contest shows the sheer quality of innovation and inspiration among European start-ups today and in London in particular. It’s awesome to see so many great pitches and passionate entrepreneurs.”
Final four finalists out of 100 applicants in qualifying round
Bertie Stephens, CEO of Flubit with his prize last night. Photo by Conor McCabe Photography
Trustev is a Cork-based start-up which provides real-time online identity verification using a proprietary social fingerprinting technology to combat e-commerce fraud. With just a few lines of code, Trustev adds new social verification layers to the checkout process which pre-qualifies customers by analysing social data from sources including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Flubit’s discount platform promises users a discount on anything, anytime. It aims to create lower prices for users that don’t exist elsewhere while keeping margins optimised and attractive for merchants. It offers a conversion rate of 30%, ten times higher than the e-commerce average and says its strength is in not being social and focusing on the individual consumer.
Grand Cru is a Finnish game developer targeting the iOS tablet gaming. Its first game, The Supernauts, launches in Q2 2013 and is sandbox world building game influenced by Minecraft and featuring multi-player support. The company has 3 more games in production for 2013. It was founded in 2011 and has already raised $2 million.
Kreditech is a German online big data scoring technology enabling faster, better, more sustainable credit decisions. It uses data and algorithms to predict how creditworthy a customer is in real-time based on 8,000 data points. It operates business-to-consumer micro-loan platforms across the globe and builds business-to-business real-time scoring models for banks, lenders and deb collectors.
Digital London image via Shutterstock
