Meet the startups that just pitched at EF’s 6th Demo Day (and our top picks)

I’ve just finished watching Entrepreneur First‘s sixth cohort’s Demo Day in London. The event, held at Facebook’s UK HQ, saw 21 newly outed startups pitch their wares on stage to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene.

But before I give a run down of the presenting companies, including our top 3 picks, here’s a quick reminder of how EF works and what has made it the new darling of the UK startup community.

Founded back in 2011 by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, the so-called “talent first” investor targets the best technical graduates in Europe and beyond to put them through a six-month program where they form teams and in turn found startups.

This includes financial support in the form of a monthly stipend for living costs while founders find their co-founders and decide on an idea. This is then followed by £10,000 in pre-seed funding, in addition to office space, legal and administrative support, and mentoring and advice from the EF team and external entrepreneurs from the wider UK startup scene.

It is this “pre-team, pre-idea” approach that sets EF apart from other accelerators — and something that initially left the rather conservative European VC industry grossly underestimating its potential — while the emphasis on technical talent is producing some very interesting results.

Not least, EF’s biggest (albeit only significant) exit to date: Magic Pony, sold to Twitter for a reported $150 million and creating a huge return for EF itself and the 1-year-old startup’s other early investors.

EF has also raised two funds of its own, having just announced its £40 million “Next Stage Fund” to add to £8.4 million raised last year. The new investment vehicle, which is majority backed by the UK taxpayer-funded British Business Bank and also counts LPs such as Imperial College, Sir Charles Dunstone’s Freston Ventures, and Isomer Capital, will co-invest in graduating companies at the seed and Series A stage.

Our top 3 picks from EF6 Demo Day

Calipsa

Calipsa describes itself as automating traffic video surveillance using Artificial Intelligence. Its computer vision and big data technology claims to be able to tap into a city’s existing CCTV infrastructure (no new hardware required) and crunch all of that data on a per vehicle or item level, including counting cars!

And, ‘Big Brother’ tendencies not withstanding, the resulting efficiencies have a lot of potential to improve city security, traffic control and planning. Or, in the words of the team pitching, to make our cities smarter.

Accurx

Accurx is tackling the problem of eliminating inappropriate use of antibiotics, which is a major contributor to the diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics. Basically, antibiotics are dramatically over-prescribed and, due to bacteria resistance, are becoming less effective.

To help physicians make better decisions regarding appropriate use of antibiotics, the startup is building what it describes as a “supervised, linked, person-level dataset, to provide empirical diagnoses free from human biases”.

In practice, this translates into much better data, linking medical history, presenting symptoms, treatment given, and, most crucially, clinical outcomes. By crunching this data and providing supporting tools, the idea is to remove human bias from the antibiotic prescription process.

Drafter

Admittedly more frivolous than most of the ideas being pitched today, Drafter is an inbox assistant that automatically drafts email responses based on your previous interactions.

It’s initially aimed at sales people. Why? Because — or so the pitch goes — a speedy response to a sales enquiry, of, say, 5 minutes, dramatically increases the chances of closing a sale.

In fact, the first to respond is invariably the person who wins the deal, yet response times are on average 10 hours. And so much of sales involves a very repetitive workflow.

Drafter. AI tool to speed up response times to sales emails. #ef6 pic.twitter.com/rPvKG2qJci — Entrepreneur First (@efLDN) September 6, 2016

Eventually, however, Drafter, wants to apply its tech to any kind of email, eliminating the times you begin composing a new email only to think, “I’m sure I’ve written this exact same response before”. Welcome to my world, people.

The full list of presenting teams (in their own words)