Collider alumni Avocarrot sold to Glispa for $20 million

"Mobile ad exchanger and Collider alumni, Avocarrot, has been sold to Glispa Global Group for $20 million dollars."

That was the news this September, and one that just shows the impact of the Collider accelerator programme. Congratulations to the team!

Avocarrot joined Collider's first ever accelerator programme in 2013 when we had just six brands and nine start ups, all operating from a back alley off Leicester Square. But it didn't take them long before they headed off to San Francisco to continue their journey in the tech space.

The team accelerated at an incredible pace, and in under four years sold to a fantastic collaborator for the future.

This news shows that we're beginning to see the results of our efforts to create a successful, thriving and in demand MadTech community, all stemming from London.

We can't wait to see what happens next.

Choosing startups for an accelerator: How we find the best of the best

Every year, we scour the globe for up to 10 top madtech startups to join our accelerator – in fact, we’re smack bang in the middle of doing just that right now.

We want to uncover the most innovative ideas, discover teams with incredible hustle and ultimately, find what we believe could be the next big thing in the marketing and adtech space.

Here’s a breakdown of how we find, interview and pick our startups from start to finish.

Inbound: The applications

We invite startups to apply directly to our accelerator using F6S – it’s quick and easy for you and helps to gives us a first look into what it is you’re creating.

Outbound: Referrals

Thanks to the Collider team, investors, brands, mentors and alumni all being submersed in the industry and on top of what’s going on, referrals play a large part in the startups we consider each year.

Keeping an eye out

Proactive research is also a huge part of how we work at Collider. Events, tech hubs and industry specific databases are all ways in which we reach out to start ups.

The two most important things we look for is a signifier that your startup fits into the space we work in, and an impressive idea that sparks our interest.

What are we looking for?

We’re looking for the must have, not the nice to have.

Many of our questions are centred around working out whether we’re the best people to help you, and whether you’ll get the most you can out of our programme.

And you can never under estimate the importance of a great team – it’s incredible to see how significant the people are to the investors’ decisions.

Throughout the entire process, we look at around 600 companies to ensure we really are finding the best in this space.

Stage one – a phone call

This usually lasts around 30 minutes and gives you a chance to properly explain exactly what it is that you’re doing. This process usually happens around September/October time, with our feedback given within 2-4 weeks.

Expect the key question: “What are your main challenges?” We don’t ask this to catch you out – it’s to make sure you’re a fit for our accelerator so we can give you the very best value.

Stage two – Collider Partner chat

This step is for us to get our heads together and discuss as a team: who you are, what it is you’re doing and whether you’re a good fit for Collider, drawing on our previous experiences. A model that most major VC’s also follow, it allows us to bounce off each other and on a high level, how we could see your idea fitting into the market.

Stage three – Pitch to Collider Partners

If you get through to this stage, this is your chance to really impress us from the get go – the aim is to get us talking! We’ll ask you to prepare a five minute pitch, usually followed by a short Q&A.

The most important thing we gain here is seeing what you’re like face-to-face and to get to know the team.

You’ll know within one week if you’re through to the final stage.

Stage four – Pitch to Collider Investors

Selection Day – the big one.

This works in a very similar way to stage three: a five minute pitch followed by a short Q&A, but this is in front of the very people who could be investing in your startup.

Our investors all have incredible and relevant experience in this field, and use this to help curate a list of the very best startups they believe could work in the real world. We start moving fast here – you’ll find out the next day.

Quick tips

If you’re considering applying for our accelerator programme, ask yourself these questions and then come and say hi:

1. How did this project start?

2. What challenges do you face?

3. Why Collider?

Applications are Open for the Class of 2017

LONDON | 16/06/2016

Collider, London’s leading marketing and adtech (or MadTech) accelerator has opened for entries to its fifth accelerator programme.

The programme offers startups up to £80K in equity funding for up to a one-year mentorship driven programme. Collider also partners with global brands and agencies who are looking to work directly with startups. Up to 10 startups will receive £30K equity investment for a four-month Collision Phase programme with 130+ hours of support.

• The programme focuses on providing the necessary customer feedback early-stage startups need to scale
• Expert mentorship from veteran entrepreneurs and senior brands and agency executives occurs weekly throughout the first four months

• Post-Collision Phase, up to five startups will receive £50K equity investment, and a further 8 months’ support from Collider, the Growth Phase
• By the end of one year, startups should have enough market traction to raise a late seed or Series A investment round
• Investment comes from smart Angel Investors with a unique offering they bring to startups from the marketing and advertising world, who also participate in the programme as mentors

The four-month programme is designed to provide enough customer feedback for startups to have trials in the pipeline by Demo Day. In 2016, over 200 brand and agency individuals attended the Demo Day, a commercial launch for the Class of 2016 startup cohort.

Current Corporate partners of Collider include Asda, DigitasLBi, dunnhumby, Exterion Media, Haymarket, Ogilvy & Mather Group UK, Puma, Reevoo, The National Lottery and Unilever. Collider has invested in 34 startups in the MadTech industry over the past four years.

Rose Lewis, Co-Founder of Collider says: “Industry leaders are approaching us because of the structured programme and framework we provide, and startups come to us because of the tailored mentorship and connections in our network. Brands and agencies have understood they need to work with startups to stay ahead of their competition. We provide the framework and guidance for them to do this with measured returns.”

Jubair Jalil, Co-Founder SyncSpot, Collider Class of 2015 says; "Collider puts the SMART in smart money! The contacts, exposure and mentorship are priceless."

Startups can apply on f6s at the following link: http://f6s.com/colliderclass2017 Applications for the Class of 2017 close 16^th October, 2016. The Programme begins early December, 2016.

Financial Times powers marketing innovation through partnership with startup accelerator Collider

28 June 2016 | London

Today the Financial Times begins a year-long partnership with London-based Collider, a tech business accelerator focusing on innovation in marketing and advertising.

Over the course of the year, the FT will work with Collider on a structured programme for its product, technology and commercial teams, aimed at stimulating new ideas and answering questions around how to best serve clients and readers in the future. The programme will include:

● Innovation workshops providing practical skills for staff to work effectively with startups ● ‘Deep Dives’ focused on generating creative solutions to problems using new technologies ● Opportunities to connect directly with startups focused on business and talent development

Jon Slade, chief commercial officer at the Financial Times, said; “We're thrilled to be announcing our partnership with Collider. The disruption of the publishing world, and in particular within advertising and marketing, creates wonderful opportunities for experimentation, and the startup environment can inspire much of the future fuel for our growth engines. Collider are experts at filtering and nurturing innovation in this space, and we're really excited about working with the team. All businesses need to ensure that they have a consistent injection of energy, and the FT's partnership with Collider further underlines the FT's credentials and intentions around digital innovation.”

Andy Tait, co-founder of Collider says: “Collaborating with publishers is always a pleasure at Collider, and working with the FT is something very special for us. Disruption to traditional publisher models present great opportunities and we’re delighted that the FT has a strong desire to understand the value of working with innovative startups from across the globe”.

Collider currently works with leading industry publishers, including Haymarket in London. The team have a long history of working with publishers, from co-founder Rose Lewis’ experiences as head of sales in the UK at Ziff-Davis, to partner Frank Kelcz, who has launched 27 magazines in eight languages, on three continents.

Collider has invested in 34 startups in the marketing and advertising technology (MadTech) space over the past four years. The FT joins Collider’s current corporate partners including Asda, DigitasLBi, dunnhumby, Exterion Media, Haymarket, Ogilvy & Mather Group UK, Puma, Reevoo, The National Lottery and Unilever.

The partnership follows the FT’s recent investment in Alpha Grid, a company specialising in the development and production of quality branded content.

###

For more information, please contact:

Financial Times

Megan Dold megan.dold[at]ft.com T: +44 (0) 20 7775 6587 M: +44 (0) 7429 394 221

Collider

Alexandra Connerty alexandra[at]collider.io T: +44 (0) 20 7099 2160 M: +44 (0) 7541 214246

About the Financial Times:

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing essential news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community, the FT has a combined paid print and digital circulation of 793,000. Mobile is an increasingly important channel for the FT, driving half of total traffic.

About Collider:

Collider is an accelerator dedicated to marketing and advertising startups, who help brands and agencies identify, understand, engage with and sell to their consumers. Collider invests capital in these startups, coaches them through a highly structured programme and connects them to potential corporate customers and investors. Collider also partner with brilliant brands and agencies to help them work closely with game-changing tech and introduce their teams to new ways of working.

Behind the Scenes: Cablato

Hear the startups participating in Collider’s first Startup Booster Programme. We’re taking you behind the scenes.

Who are you and what do you do?

Cablato is redefining digital media by bringing hyper-personalised creative to programmatic advertising. Our programmatic-creative ad-serving platform is the first of its kind to combine leading-edge data management and cross device, dynamic ad serving. The result is an exceptional personalised customer experience throughout the customer journey, with every individual receiving a uniquely personalised ad in less than 5 milliseconds. Convenience and simplicity forms the basis of our proprietary technology. Built in the cloud, our platform simplifies creating and managing personalised advertising campaigns across any device, at scale, accelerating results up to 10 times. Our data platform is the easiest and most compliant way for advertisers to on-board customer, enterprise, first and third party data for digital advertising. Our integrated recommendation engine analyses multiple data sources, deciding on the perfect combination of creative, price, offer and CTA for each consumer in under a second. Integrated with major mobile and web ad trading platforms (DSPs), Cablato enables advertisers to gain all the benefits of personalised advertising while still retaining full control of campaigns and media spend using their existing technologies. Not surprisingly, Cablato is quickly gaining traction with campaigns going live for major advertisers in the USA, Europe, Asia and Australasia and partnership agreements being set up with Oracle and Acxiom.

Who are your co-founders & give us one line about each of you.

Adrian Pearmund is a digital business specialist with in depth knowledge in Programmatic Advertising, Data, Technology, Digital Media and Mobile Alex Vernikov is Cablato’s CTO, technology architect and chief engineer.

Where in the world are you from and what drew you to London?

Adrian is from London and Alex is from Amsterdam. Outside of the US, London is the hub for media, data and programmatic and offers the biggest market opportunity.

What excites you most about London (one startup point and one non-startup point!)?

London is a vibrant, exciting city. Being in London, we’re fortunate to be at the centre of media and tech innovation, have access to great talent and global clients.

Explain why your company is a MadTech company, and how you plan to disrupt the larger ecosystem.

Cablato is at the forefront of media technology and innovation. We are the industry's first true programmatic-creative ad-serving platform that combines leading edge data management and cross device ad-serving to deliver exceptional personalised customer experiences throughout the buyer journey. The platform enables brands and agencies to seamlessly on-board and use data for creative personalisation and optimisation, generate dynamic ads based on both owned and purchased data, including customer CRM, enterprise data such as pricing and availability, third party data, contextual data and behavioural data – in real-time. By connecting and actioning multiple data sources in realtime, accuracy and relevancy of creative is improved whilst ad-serving latency is keep to a minimal. This is not going to be possible in set-ups which connect independent data sources and ad-servers, where latency could be issue, learning feedback loops don’t exist and sets-ups are manual, complex and require manual optimisation. Cablato will also pass back segment IDs to the DSP assisting with optimisation and performance, another unique feature. Typical ad serving and dynamic content features are covered by standard in the platform, but it’s our ability to use broad historical and real-time data for personalisation, combined with the capabilities of our platform that we believe makes Cablato unbeaten.

What is one challenge you have had to overcome since beginning your journey?

As with all new technology, it can be complex to explain simply, especially to individuals outside of the media and programmatic media industries. As the concept of programmatic creative has gained more traction, this challenge has become easier

Tell us about where you think Collider can add the most value to you over the next four months

Collider has an unparalleled reputation for supporting and accelerating the growth and advertising technologies companies. Being part of the Collider family, we look forward to gaining business support, access to prospective clients and investors.

What advice would you give to founders who are applying to Collider

Clarify your business proposition, it’s value, the need in the market and opportunity. Work on your financial model, understand SaaS business models, MRR etc. Get some traction Persevere!