ISEF 2022
With an eventual return to in-person events, the ISEF 2022 grand final was hosted in the Iveagh Garden Hotel on March 28th. Three startups went head to head, delivering passionately innovative pitches for our prize pot of €10,000. Cotter Agritech emerged as our overall winner.
Startups
Cotter Agritech
Our overall winners, Cotter Agritech’s main product is the Cotter Create. It is a sheep handling crate that makes carrying out stock management tasks, for both lambs and adult sheep, quick, easy and safe, including dosing, vaccinating, tagging, dagging, weighing, mouthing, body condition scoring, and 3-way drafting.
Developed by sheep farming brothers Jack and Nick Cotter, the Cotter Crate was created having recognised the industry’s need for a handling system that focuses on making lamb handling easier, and also caters to adult sheep.
The result is a simple to use system, where the animal is comfortably held under its own weight at operator height, without any pressure being applied, resulting in a calm handling experience for both handler and livestock and reducing animal handling time by up to 50%.
FINALBEND
FINALBEND is an athleisure wear brand set up by Emma Coffey back when she was still in 5th year of secondary school. The idea to start the business came from her love of athletics. She had been involved in athletics pretty much all of her life and when an injury took her out of competing she focused on FINALBEND to keep a connection to the sport.
FINALBEND wants to be able to provide sustainably made products at sustainable prices. The ultimate goal is to be able to upgrade all of their material to sustainable eco materials without compromising on their ethos of being an affordable brand.
Kreoh
Kreoh is a data driven platform that utilizes modern software engineering practices to augment computer science education.
Kreoh allows you to integrate Code Reviews in a practical manner. Promote active engagement as a lecturer and gain deeper insights into student work contribution. Put bounties on programming paradigms for goal directed code reviews. Supports reviewing data science tools such as Jupyter Notebooks.
Business Leaders
Martina Fitzgerald
Martina Fitzgerald has almost twenty years media experience and is the author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed book, ‘Madam Politician: The women at the table of Irish political power’, which was published in 2018. She has also undertaken research on US female politicians at Columbia University in New York and has worked as a volunteer in Laos in southeast Asia, delivering communications and empowerment courses to pre-university women. Currently she is the CEO of Scale Ireland; an independent, not-for-profit organisation which supports, represents and advocates on behalf of Ireland’s tech start-up and scale-up companies.
Will O’Brien
Will is VP of Growth & Government Affairs at Zipp Mobility, which pursue the mission to reduce congestion and provide an environmentally friendly alternative to cars. Zipp will be a quick and convenient way to travel around the city and provide customers with a ‘last-mile’ solution to and from public transport links. Will is also a graduate of University College Dublin and former Head of Operations for ISEF.
Deirdre O’Neill
Deirdre O’Neill is a Senior Regional Development Executive at Enterprise Ireland. She is currently responsible for the development and implementation of Enterprise Ireland’s regional strategy for indigenous industry in the Dublin/Mid East Region with a particular emphasis on increasing the level of entrepreneurship and start-up business in the region.
Brady Acton
Brady Acton is a venture capital investor at Elkstone partners. Brady joined the venture team in October 2021 as an Investment Associate. Prior to Elkstone, he was an M&A consultant at Deloitte in New York and co-founded an investment-backed startup as an undergraduate student in the US.
Brady holds an MSc in Digital Marketing Strategy from Trinity College Dublin and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Villanova University and Stanford University. With a great deal of experience with startups, he is also on the boards of Allsorter.com, Output Sports and RecommenderX.