Last night, we hosted our first Start Tank Demo Day to celebrate the end of our first cycle of Start Tank London, which
launched in October last year. After a rigorous application and interview process, the Braintree Developer and Startup Relations team welcomed five resident startups, Bar Pass, Henchman, Localz, Mega Transfert and Trendii, and guided them through the ins and outs of daily startup life for six months.
This joint PayPal and Braintree initiative provides startups with co-working space in our central London offices as well as access to mentors from PayPal and Braintree. Start Tank residents are also accepted into the
Startup Blueprint programme which means they get free transaction volume up to $1.5 million (US Dollars) with PayPal and free transaction volume up to $100,000 (US Dollars) with Braintree.
All equally different and equally promising, it’s been great fun to mentor the five start-ups together with my colleagues across PayPal and Braintree including startup advisors, sales, legal, merchant services, finance, human resources and product.
We’re pleased to see the progress these startups have made:
Bar Pass - helps the hospitality sector build apps to enable customers to order and pay for food and drinks through a smart phone as well as integrate personalized offers and rewards to customers. While at Start tank Bar Pass has:
- Expanded from 6 to 14 employees
- Increased the use of its ordering platform by +60% month over month
- Increased revenues 300% year over year
- Won the contract to build a bespoke ordering and delivery system for Aintree Racecourse to be launched in April at The Grand National, the largest horse race in Europe
Henchman - provides an app and service where users can order anything they want from any restaurant or shop and have it delivered to them within 60 minutes. During its time at Start Tank Henchman has:
- Increased growth by 100% month over month in gross revenue and number of deliveries per month (hundreds of deliveries every week)
- Received £50,000 investment from Angel investors
- Added 3,000 new users
- Signed multiple restaurant partners to their platform
Localz - is an enterprise grade micro location platform that helps quickly integrate iBeacon based proximity interactions into iOS and Android apps. Localz is the 2014 Winner of John Lewis’ business incubator JLAB and since joining Start Tank London it has:
- Doubled the size of the team from 7 to 14 full time employees
- Closed 3 deals and 5 customer trials with top UK and global enterprise customers including John Lewis, Woolworths Australia and Homepass in Australia
- Closed 6 strategic partnerships with top tech global stakeholders including Teradata, Salesforce and DisplayData
MegaTransfert - is a mobile payment service that enables millennials and gamers to create and spark their own e-money, since it joined Start Tank London it has:
- Increased profitability with +30% growth year over year and a turnover growth of +75%
- Expanded the team from 8 people in France to 27 people split between France, UK and Ireland
- Closed a deal with Amazon EU of 500K amazon free MP3 gift cards to promote Amazon on YouPass
- Graduated as National Champion at the European Business Awards.
Trendii - is a social commerce platform that allows users to create, share and inspire using images, videos, audio, articles and products. During the company’s time at Start Tank Trendii has:
- Launched Trendii 2.0 as well as now launched Trendii.com worldwide
- Recruited a Global Team of Community Managers across, Europe, South America, Central America and Australia
- Been featured at The Web Summit in Dublin amongst the Alpha program
- Partnered with Sneakerness and hosted a
photo-booth at a sneaker convention in Amsterdam
I’m looking forward to see how these startups continue to grow beyond their time at Start Tank. With the success of Start Tank Cycle 1, we can’t wait to see what the next wave of resident startups will do.
Start Tank Cycle 2 will start in mid-April, if you are interested in joining, you can apply up until March 25th
here.