The funding from the Stephen Young award will go towards the development of our AI-driven real time coaching for employability advisers – our aim is to better support the profession to drive forward solutions that work for unemployed jobseekers.

We at CataNiTek are hugely grateful to have received the Inspire100 award, and at such a crucial point of our journey. I know that it will have a huge impact both for the team behind the spinout, but also in addressing key objectives for the spinout going forward. Which include using the prize support to seed potential sales via a high impact front cover publication which will advertise our product capabilities directly to target customers and end users, as well as accessing sector specific information relating to potential customer supply chains & pains that currently use polluting precious metal catalysts like palladium.

We are honoured to have received this prize from the Strathclyde Inspire team. This comes at a critical inflection point in our journey, between closing Proof of Concept and scale-up, before seeking further investment funding to set up our own R&D lab in Scotland for full scale up and commercialisation. The Inspire 100 funding  will help strengthen our initial path to scale-up, enabling us to bring commercial expertise onto the team to accelerate in becoming investor-ready. The network connections we have made through participating in the Inspire 100 has been phenomenal, with key partners identified with the potential to work together, either in similar or linked industries.

  We are very grateful to have received this prize funding as it is crucial for the next steps in our business plan. We will be using the £5k to hire a software developer to produce the MVP version of our app. With this MVP we will gain our first customers and begin to grow our business.

The prize money will allow us to address a number of commercial challenges that are out of scope for research funding and will accelerate the spin-out process by bridging the gap between university funding and venture capital investment. Firstly, it will help us create a competitive intellectual property strategy, by working with an IP specialist firm, and will accelerate the licensing process by allowing us to hire a lawyer. We will work with a product development consultancy to assist in the development of a production unit from our current lab prototype, and we will be able to hire a commercial champion to support us in the development of the business plan and its execution.

Inspire100 was a great opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs going through similar journeys such as my own, as well as network with supporters and investors, it’ll make a positive impact on the growth of the company and is a major step in progress. Our aim is to use this money for match funding to secure a larger grant to develop our Minimum Viable Product.