The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
£100k prize for Dundee Uni big data spin-out firm
Platinum Informatics one of 24 firms to win pitch competition cash
Big data focused Dundee University spin-out firm Platinum Informatics has received a major boost after scooping £100,000 in development funding at the latest Scottish EDGE awards.
The prize was the maximum available to firms competing in their category.
Scottish EDGE is a multi-faceted business pitching competition and the latest round – the 13th – was the biggest ever with a total prize pot of almost £2 million available.
The largest award of the night – the £150,000 Higgs Special Award – went to ClinSpec Diagnostics, a Glasgow-based firm using novel technologies to develop fast, sensitive blood tests for the early detection of cancer.
Platinum Informatics took home £100,000 as one of 24 individual winners on the night.
The firm provides software solutions for the management, visualisation and analysis of large and complex data sets in a wide range of laboratory and industrial environments.
It spun out from Dundee University on the back of more than 10 years of development work by Professor Angus Lamond and his team within the School of Life Sciences.
“We are delighted to have won the Scottish Edge competition,” Prof Lamond said.
“This will greatly help us deliver our innovative Smart Laboratory Notebook and shows the potential for research at the University of Dundee to deliver impact and create new jobs.”
Head of software engineering, Rob Kent said: “The competition has been a fantastic and rewarding experience for us and we are very grateful for this opportunity to expand our fantastic team of software developers and continue our drive to build a company of scale right here in Dundee.”
Scottish EDGE has three pitching categories and a further three special awards, of which the Higgs is one.
The latest contest takes total grants awarded by the scheme to circa £13m since 2013, with more than 1,600 jobs created as a result.
Scottish EDGE CEO Evelyn McDonald said: “As an organisation collaborating with others to make Scotland the best place for business, finding ourselves in the position to support so many inspiring entrepreneurs is an incredible outcome.”
The competition is supported by serial entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter.
He said: “Scotland has a proud heritage of innovation and through EDGE we’re seeing a renewed spirit of entrepreneurship developing.”