Every year, the who’s who of the South West UK start-up scene descend on the SPARKies awards. With a wealth of talent and buckets of investment heading to the region each year, it’s a great chance to showcase what’s going on in one of the most tech rich corners of the country.

This year, we’re delighted to be up for the People’s Choice Award – an award introduced in 2016 and designed to give you the chance to crown one plucky start-up who revs your engine.

We take a look at previous nominees as well as eye up the competition this year. And, ahem, if you do want to vote for us (or any of the other nominated companies), you can do so here.

Previous nominees of the SPARKies People’s Choice Award include:

Gapsquare

Shining a scientific light on inequality, Gapsquare uses data analytics for good. With increasing scrutiny on transparency when it comes to pay in gender and other sources of inbalance, Gapsquare’s tech helps companies not only comply, but to improve their internal standards.

Open Bionics

There are a few companies that make you feel a bit silly sometimes. Open Bionics are one of them. Giving the gift of movement via their award winning prosthetics, they’ve undercut the market by around 30 times.

LettusGrow

LettusGrow are building the farms of the future. We’d never heard of Aeroponics, but apparently you can now grow plants from, well, the air. Their patented technology uses 95% less water than traditional agriculture.

Wriggle

We’re a bit biased, but our Bristol based food and drink buddies have made our list. Their chatty tone and user friendly app, make discovering the many many new eateries popping up in Bristol an absolute pleasure.

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The 2019 Competition

Here are this year’s contenders. Here you can vote for your favourite.

limber

We haven’t found out who nominated us yet, but when we do, we owe them a drink. They said:

“I believe that limber has landed on a concept that could change employment forever, where the rights of employer and employee are considered equal and hard work is always appreciated.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

Bunk

Bunk is the rental app that empowers landlords and tenants with all the tools they need to rent, without letting agents.

From nomination: “The vast majority of students go through university without putting any thought to their credit history. This leads to a poor credit rating which can seriously restrict their quality of life without access to mainstream banking services (eg. a loan). After renting for years tenants find that their credit history is sub-optimal when they apply for a mortgage. Why don’t all those years of reliable rental payments count?

Open Bionics (again!)

Open Bionics turns disabilities into superpowers.

The Bristol-based bionics company is known globally for using 3D printing and 3D scanning, along with some clever software and design, to make advanced, affordable and accessible bionic limbs for amputees

SEIKK

‘For Adventures, By Adventures’. A shoppable magazine for active gentlemen.

From nomination: “What if an aspirational lifestyle magazine provided the retail experience of a department store and was uniquely tailored to each customer?

Virti

Improving performance for healthcare and beyond. From nomination: “Virti provides revolutionary training to medical professionals and students.

Virti is aiming to make medical training cheaper for all and help improve the performance of medical professionals worldwide. Virti has participated in several business accelerators including the NHS Innovation Accelerator, Boost VC and several others.”

Yellow Dog

The only intelligent predictive scheduling and orchestration platform for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud.

From nomination: “The technology developed satisfies a business need of access to digital resource, whilst meeting the environmental need of reducing waste and avoiding having to create more resource.

Epics

Build the ultimate collection of your favourite CS:GO players and teams on Epics.

From nomination: “Ever since this app first started, it’s done nothing but blow up. The engagement is insane and the user-driven feeling is outstanding! Everything that the app and team provide is incredible. The network around it is growing and growing and is absolutely welcoming; it now has over 250,000 users in just over a year. I’ve never felt more welcomed into a community.”

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Our tip (other than us) – Open Bionics. Not great PR by us, but super hero prosthetics, c’mon!

See you there and good luck to everyone nominated for an award!

The final winner will be decided by the audience on the night of the SPARKies itself on Thursday 27 June at The Assembly Rooms, Bath (get your tickets here).

Cheers