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As we continue to commute to and from work in the dark, it’s hard not to notice the bright green laser lights shining off the front of London’s Santander bikes. They project a distinctive bicycle-shaped glow onto the ground ahead, giving even lost tourists a chance to safely navigate London’s busy roads.
These lights may make it easier to spot the bikes attached to them, but the origin of the lights themselves is not so obvious. The Laserlights were first introduced by Transport for London in late 2015, two years after the startup that produces them—then called Blaze, now Beryl—won the Tata Varsity Pitch, a competition celebrating the best early-stage businesses in the UK. Since winning the pitch, Beryl has evolved from a promising, one-year-old startup to a fully-fledged, international micromobility company with over £20 million in funding.
Tata Varsity Pitch 2022 Grand Final. Video by London Filmed
This type of shining success story is far from a given in startup-land, but many winners and finalists of the Tata Varsity Pitch have managed it, and continue to shape the world with their ideas. WASE helps businesses turn their waste into renewable energy; Adaptavate has raised more than £2m to develop its carbon-absorbing construction materials, in part from the UK government; and Turtle Pack sells its super-cute swimming aids all over the world—there’s even a swim academy spun out of the startup.
Tata, an Indian multinational known to many for its steel, isn’t the first company you’d expect to be holding a British startup competition alongside the National Association of College and University Entrepreneurs (NACUE)—but when you get to know Tata better, the venture clearly makes sense. The company comprises more than 30 companies across ten verticals, from Jaguar Land Rover in automotive to Tata Consumer (the makers of Tetley tea), and Tata Communications, which operates 30 percent of the world’s internet. The connecting mission across the board is: “to improve the quality of life of the communities we serve”, which is genuinely backed up by the fact that 66 percent of Tata’s holding company’s profits go into philanthropic trusts.
That mission is also the basis of how startups are selected for the Tata Varsity Pitch, while the breadth of Tata’s subsidiaries is echoed in how the competition is structured. Seven finalists are chosen across seven categories, each backed by mentors from a different Tata wing, as well as experts from NatWest Enterprise and business development network The D Group. The Health & Wellbeing category is supported by Tata Communications, for example, while Digital & Technical is paired with Jaguar Land Rover.
“We hope that through the various stages of judging and mentorship that our Tata companies provide throughout the stages of competition, each of the Finalists has developed skills and expertise that will be invaluable to them going forward,” says Tim Jones CBE, 2022 Varsity Pitch judge and executive director of Tata Limited. Of the seven finalists, one winner is chosen to receive £15,000 in prize money.
WIRED gets to choose its own winner from the finalists—the startup that most closely aligns with our values. This year, that honor went to BoxxDocks, an adaptable shipping box that’s a lot more exciting than it sounds. “The largest challenge facing logistics companies today is the shipment of fresh air,” BoxxDocks cofounder James Della Valle explained in his one-minute pitch video. But these smart containers can be adjusted to suit whatever they’re carrying—saving every delivery van a gallon of fuel per day. As WIRED events curator João Medeiros said on stage, this “is something we like to champion at WIRED, which is disruptive design.”
The real star of the show, however, was overall champion of the Tata Varsity Pitch: Drill Surgeries. As its name suggests, the University of Liverpool-produced startup is aimed at improving drill-based surgeries used to secure broken bones. These are currently so difficult to do, they require two hours of tedious, expensive procedures, when they could be simplified to 30 minutes.
Cofounder Moises Barbera Ramos is the son of an orthopaedic surgeon, so has had a close connection to this field his whole life, but his experience with AI and robotics took his involvement to the next level. Ramos has developed an AI-driven surgical guidance system called ZAORY that, he says, “maps the whole operating theater, recognizes where the surgery is taking place, and provides visual guidance.” So, instead of using a trial and error technique, involving a lot of potentially harmful X-rays, surgeons can fix metal pins to bones in just one simple step.
This change in technique could impact as many as eight million patients per year, which is what gave this startup an edge over its competitors. “In business you can have revenue-generation business cases and cost-reduction business cases … this is a huge cost-reduction business case,” Jones said after presenting the award. He explained that the judges were impressed by “the amount of wasted time in highly valuable real estate, like operating theaters, that can be got at by what [Drill Surgeries] are doing.”
Ramos is now mere months away from human trials and says Drill Surgeries’ techniques will reduce operating time by 75 percent, cut radiation exposure by 60 percent and result in lower costs to hospitals and faster recovery time for patients. “We have worked really hard to position ourselves as the leading company creating real-time surgical navigation through AI, and thanks to the support from Tata Varsity Pitch, we are closer than ever to bring this technology to market,” he says.
If you are thinking of applying to become the Varsity Pitch winner of 2023, Ramos shares his tips for your pitch here, and you can keep up to date with information and entry details by subscribing here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
