Students from the University of Bristol have secured £10,000 of funding for their new business model.
SLANT is the brainchild of Innovation master's students and hopes to create a tap-to-rent trailer that could take millions of cars off the road. The 'weightless' shopping e-trailer can be attached to a bike or e-scooter and could cut the estimated £4.5bn car journeys made to supermarkets each year.
The team, which includes a Mercedes engineer, medical physicist and finance, biology and history graduates, have said that the trailers would be weightless due to their electric motors and trips would cost an average of £4. The e-trailer could easily be pushed or pulled on foot.
Bristol Innovation students are tasked with creating businesses that solve real world problems. SLANT has just won £10,000 from the University’s innovation start-up incubator Runway, which they will use to build two prototypes to refine the design.
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SLANT say their e-trailers will take cars off the road, make shopping trips more sustainable and will be particularly useful for car-less shoppers, who must take taxis or walk home with heavy bags.
Artemis Fragkopoulos, a Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship MSc student, said the number of car trips to UK supermarkets was “mind-boggling”, with 73% of shoppers using cars to get to and from the supermarket, totalling 4.5 billion journeys each year.
Mr Fragkopoulos said: "In England, 19% of car journeys are made only to go shopping; if we could cut even half of these it would make a huge impact on traffic and the environment, and could mean people don’t need to spend so much of their income on cars."
Like Uber Eats or Deliveroo, casual workers would locate the SLANT trailers and take them back to the supermarket for cash. In the next few months, SLANT will look to partner with a supermarket to trial the trailer. They plan to raise seed funding later in the year before pursuing a patent.
Tarun George Maddila, a Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship MSc student originally from India, said: "We hope this sustainable solution will help the environment and consumers - and supermarkets too, by increasing footfall, decreasing congestion and helping their net-zero commitments.
"I’m really excited by innovation – and when I wanted to study it I couldn’t think of a better place than Bristol. Without this course, and mixing with students and lecturers with all sorts of expertise, we never would have come up with this idea. We couldn’t be happier to win this funding, which will help us build the next stage of SLANT."
SLANT was one of six businesses to win a total of £69,000 in funding at a Runway pitching event this week. The judges were all University of Bristol alumni who had achieved success as entrepreneurs and now want to support student founders.
Mark Neild, Director of Runway and Senior Innovation lecturer, said: "I feel proud to work with such a talented group of young innovators who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in a wide range of endeavours.
“Our expert judges uniformly complimented them on the excellent standard of their pitches. I am grateful to our supporters who are empowering our students to achieve far greater impact than they could on their own.”
Read next:
Bristol business wins competition for free workspace and support
Newquay's Headland Hotel director Veryan Palmer on employment opportunities for young people
Students to pitch for £75,000 start-up funding in University of Bristol's 'Innovation Showcase 2023'
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