GeoSpock Limited (GeoSpock) announced the final close of a seed investment round that has raised £708,500. The investment has been led by notable UK entrepreneurs including Dr. Darrin Disley, CEO of personalised medicine firm Horizon Discovery Group plc (AIM: HZD); Dr. Jonathan Milner, ex-CEO and founder of internet life science firm AbCam plc (AIM: ABC); and Mr. Peter Keen, CEO of Cambridge Innovation Capital and previously a co-founder of Chiroscience Group plc.
GeoSpock has also received £74,000 investment as part of its entry into the TechStars London Winter 2014 programme. Entry into the programme followed two months of in-depth technical vetting from sector experts with less than 1% of many hundreds of entrants making the cut.
Lasting three months, the programme provides an intense focus on: defining product-market fit; accelerating product development; developing global customer, mentor and investor networks; and finishes with each company delivering a product demonstration to several hundred of the world's top venture capital firms and tech investors.
Graduates of the programme have an extraordinarily high success rate with greater than 90% of the 473 entrants since 2007 still active. TechStars companies having gone on to raise investment sums that range from £0.5M to £40 million (Avg. £1.2 million) and greater than 11% already having gone on to make meaningful exits via merger or acquisition.
Since its foundation in February 2013 GeoSpock has been developing breakthrough technology that enables extreme-scale geospatial applications to be run at a lower cost while consistently maintaining sub-second response times regardless of how large the dataset grows. The fundamental product, GeoWarp, is widely applicable and has stolen a march upon existing geospatial database technologies, which suffer from performance degradation and increased running costs as data sizes grow.
The GeoWarp core also powers the company's second product Collide, a next-generation mobile enterprise enablement platform that gives app developers, brands and agencies the ability to develop extreme-scale, multi-functional and proximity-based applications to deploy as part of an integrated mobile-first strategy. The platform is already been used to power commercial applications in the social networking and dating space.
Steve Marsh, CEO and co-founder of GeoSpock, commenting on the announcement, said: "At GeoSpock we believe in making the world we live in more intuitive through the use of technology. GeoWarp was built to enable a wide variety of applications to take advantage of contextual relevance with the integration and parallel searching of high-quality and multi-dimensional geospatial information.
"In a world which is rapidly changing and has the number of connected mobile devices growing exponentially we knew we had to solve the scalability challenges. Google has managed to maintain consistent sub-second query times regardless of how big the web grows; with GeoWarp we are working to achieve the same consistent sub-second query times regardless of how large your geospatial dataset grows or how rapidly it changes - and we wanted to do this while still keeping costs low."
GeoSpock is aiming to become the ubiquitous provider of Location Database-as-a-Service, and their GeoWarp technology has applications in multiple fast-growing sectors. As the number of connected devices with GPS sensors increase it is clear that current location databases will struggle to handle the massive influx of geospatial information. GeoSpock with their host of Cambridge PhDs and the backing of some major tech players hope we have hit onto the next big trend in the technology sector.
Dr Darrin Disley, Chairman, lead investor and co-founder of GeoSpock said: "I am very happy to have led the funding of GeoSpock since teaming up with Steve Marsh in 2012 whilst he was completing a PhD in extreme-scale, real-time neural networks at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. The talented team we have assembled has made great progress in developing a robust technology stack capable of both solving the big data and geospatial querying problems faced by back-end service providers, as well as enabling the development of mobile applications that combine scalability, rich and engaging functionality, and an ability to bring buyers and sellers together in a geospatial context."
GeoSpock enters the TechStars programme beginning November 10 2014.
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