Julia Glenn, chief executive of Norwich-based Extremis Technology, explains why the business should win the innovation in funding category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
We design and make fast-deployment transitional shelters for displaced people. We raised £286,000 on crowdcube in July. We worked with a private network of social impact angels in the first instance to post an initial basket of funds (circa 30% of ask) on the platform to attract further investment.
We partnered with a Latin-American NGO called ‘Techo’ to work on a trial deployment of our shelters in the favela of the Dominican Republic, planned for October this year. We marketed the collaboration on the platform, allocating £100,000 of the quantum specifically to this project.
This has allowed us to start manufacture of our shelters in the UK and to employee a senior engineer project manager for this piece of work. We also partnered with lawyers Latham & Watkins, winning pro bono legal services to support the deployment and subsequent licensing agreements for our shelters. Our collaboration has been entered into the AidEx ‘collaboration in action’ competition for November. The funds have additionally allowed us to employ an office manager and a sales support resource (to work on a number of global sales opportunities). The crowdcube raise has attracted Joint Venture opportunities in Asia.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
