Kogii, an early-stage University College Dublin (UCD) student venture, has been declared overall winner of the 2018 UCD Start-up Stars Programme. The venture received a €3,000 in cash as a prize.
Kogii is developing an innovative and feature-rich smart bike light to improve real-time safety for cyclists. It also plans to use the data acquired from the light’s sensors to help understand precisely what factors make a road dangerous for cyclists.
The UCD Start-up Stars entrepreneurship programme, now in its fourth year, has been developed by UCD Research and Innovation, the UCD Innovation Academy and UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, to support UCD undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to work together to develop and grow start-up companies.
The programme began earlier this year with cross-disciplinary workshops and course modules delivered at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and at the UCD Innovation Academy. During this period students from across the University explored and evaluated a number of real world problems before forming teams to develop start-up solutions to address the identified problems.
Six early-stage ventures were then selected to participate in an intensive mentoring programme which took place over the last 4 weeks at NovaUCD. The aim of this programme was to assist the students in refining their start-up ideas through a series of structured workshops, including taught content from industry experts, interactive workshops and regular pitching sessions. In addition each team also received a cash stipend and office space at NovaUCD.
Following final pitches, Kogii was selected as the overall winner as it was judged to have the most commercial potential and the founders received the cash prize of €3,000 sponsored by Xilinx.
Discussing Kogii’s work, group member Karl Roe said:“Every road is unique, and as a result, data needs to be gathered and analysed to evaluate why specific roads are potentially more dangerous than others. With Kogii, cyclists will be able to purchase a smart light to improve their visibility and safety, along with contributing to making roads a safer place for all cyclists simply by using it.
“It is our intention to supply this new, untapped data to governments, councils and city planners to assist them in building a safer cycling infrastructure for tomorrow.”
Pictured above: Karl Roe, Andrea Pignanelli and Callan Eldon of Kogii
Photograph by: Nick Bradshaw
