We are absolutely delighted to announce that our seed funding round was closed on the 1st of May! We have exceeded our original target and have a remarkable group of VC’s and Angels on board for the next chapter in this exciting journey. The round was led by Triple Point. Triple Point is an FCA regulated investment management firm with more than £1 billion of private, institutional and public capital under management invested across Infrastructure, Property, Debt and Venture Capital. Profiles of some of our Angels will follow in future newsletters.
In the UK, the average funding round for an early-stage tech business closes at 83% of the original goal, and pre-revenue start-ups receive less at an average of 74%. Just one in ten business secures the initial target investment amount. We’re delighted to announce that Augnet is part of that 10%, and that we are above target in this round, receiving more than £1 million in total from our investors.
We’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who worked on the proposal, and to our backers!
Grant updates
1. Augnet awarded H2020 Phase 1 grant
In April, we received confirmation that Augnet has been awarded €50,000 as part of the EU’s Horizon2020 scheme (Phase 1 of SME Instrument). Our project was one of 274 selected from a total of 2,822 put forward from across Europe, and we’re thrilled with the result. This is a highly sought-after grant, and a strong endorsement of our business potential.
2. Innovate UK grant application
Additionally, Augnet has applied for the £1 million Innovate UK grant, aimed at developing new ideas and innovations. With help of this grant we intend to focus and accelerate development of key elements of the Augnet platform, including the core AugnetMQ software and MQTT message server.
For this project, we will be in close collaboration with the team at Cass University, combining our commercial and technical expertise with their industry-leading insights into business-focused research and innovation strategy. We will be working with Professor Stefan Haefliger, a thought leader in Strategic Management and Innovation specialising in tech and product development. Team and roadmap updates
Our newly hired engineers have all been fully on-boarded and are working hard to create our Augnet platform. To date, our progress is in line with our approved roadmap for the year.
Over the early summer, we hope to recruit two commercial experts and two more engineers. Please do reach out to us if you feel you know someone who we should be speaking to.
Deliverability in the A2P SMS market
The A2P SMS market is set to increase over the next 3-5 years, with the growing uptake in mobile payments, mobile ticketing and travel updates leading the market expansion. The market is expected to be worth US$70.32 billion by 2020. Getting deliverability right is central to building a product that will revolutionise the industry and redefine expectations.
SMS marketing has proven to be one of the most effective methods of reaching audiences, with a 98% open rate, leaving social media (29%) and email marketing (26%) lagging behind. However, deliverability is letting the industry down, with failure rates on premium routes around 5%. One of Augnet’s key goals is to address the deliverability issue and provide proof of delivery.
Message delivery is currently unreliable for multiple reasons – some unforeseeable, like disconnected numbers, and some entirely preventable, such as operator issues, overzealous spam filters and controversial “killed” messages. By creating an auditable service, we will improve tracking and success rates in deliverability.
Augnet Investor & Partner event:
The Augnet team will held our first Investors & Partners event, on 21st May in Leadenhall, in the heart of the City.
In attendance, there will be a fantastic mix of our wonderful Angel investors, VCs, partners and friends who helped us get to this stage.
Thanks for being part of this journey with us!
The Augnet team is happy to have you onboard as partners, investors and friends.
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