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Ever looked at your credit card statement and scratched your head wondering where a certain charge came from?
Enter Look Who's Charging. This fintech start-up aims to simplify the process of identifying unrecognised credit card transactions.
Look Who's Charging won the CeBIT Australia 2017 PitchFest competition in Sydney last week, which featured 10 creative techpreneurs aiming to solve real-life problems.
Each start-up had five minutes to make its pitch, and then faced five minutes of Q&A questioning from three judges.
A validation of hard work
"It's a real validation of the hard work that has gone into this. And to know that it's not just us who have noticed the problem ... and they are interested in the solution that we have created," said Look Who's Charging co-founder Nicole Grover.
She made her winning pitch to a panel of judges comprising Maureen Murphy, commercialisation adviser at Accelerating Commercialisation, Raj Dalal, founder and principal at BigInsights, and James Cameron, partner at AirTree Ventures.
Announcing the winner, Cameron said the judges really liked the product. "The ability that this start-up has shown to penetrate enterprises at the highest level is very impressive," he said.
In her pitch, Grover said Australian banks had about 14 million inquiries about unrecognised transactions from their customers every year.
The start-up has signed a seven-figure contract with an undisclosed bank.
Look Who's Charging co-founder and chief executive Stuart Grover said the product was in use in a lockdown environment, and would go live on August 1. "Then, it's about creating datasets for other countries around the world."
He told the judges that other Australian banks were keen.
It's a real validation of the hard work that has gone into this.
Nicole Grover
The start-up won a stand for CeBIT Australia 2018, $12,000 worth of hosted cloud services from Orion VM, and a 12-month membership to TiE Sydney, a non-profit, global networking community.
Stuart Grover said Singapore was Look Who's Charging's next target market. "We have already got interest from one of the major banks over in Singapore. Lot of people are also interested in the UK and the US – very large markets."
Look Who's Charging hopes to raise $2 million to build a dataset for select overseas markets.
Solving their own problem
Rivuu, which aims to streamline the social media content workflow process, took second place.
It allows people to collaborate on social media content, said Max Doyle, who started a social media marketing agency called Hello Social five years ago.
Rivuu is designed to transform the workflow of social media agencies and brands to help them to create, preview, approve and schedule published content from a single tool.
Doyle said the start-up launched on January 10, and had already signed up some international brands.
Cameron said the judges felt the Rivuu team had a "fantastic pitch, very high energy; traction was undeniable. We like the fact that they were really solving their own problem."
Good core technology
Carolyn Mee's Sound Scouts, an app that gamifies hearing screening, took third place.
Sound Scouts is designed to test the hearing of children around the time they start school.
Cameron said the judges thought the Sound Scouts team had a fantastic insight on "how to build what is a good core technology and package it in a really nice consumer application that would resonate and is resonating with the customer base, solving a real problem."
Sharing economy focus
Among the other start-ups that took part in the PitchFest were two designed for the sharing economy.
KeyHub offers key storage facilities for rental-accommodation hosts and other space sharers to drop off and swap keys in a convenient and safe location.
In his pitch, KeyHub co-founder and chief executive Vincent Shang said his goal was to expand to 15 locations in Sydney and Melbourne by the end of the year. He said KeyHub was raising $100,000 in seed investment which would go into, among other things, product development and marketing.
Another start-up tapping the sharing economy is Share with Oscar.
The app dubbed the "Airbnb for parking" allows drivers to rent private parking spots in real-time. It started when co-founder Lisa Qi could not find a parking spot at Bondi Beach for 40 minutes.
Online learning
Two start-ups focused on education. Inkerz aims to bridge the gap between the notepad and the computer to increase the effectiveness of online learning. When using Inkerz, everything a user writes on a notepad or piece of paper appears on their computer screen.
Michael Kasumovic presented the pitch for Arludo – the second start-up aimed at the education sector – and said while technology had changed our lives, today's children who have grown up with this technology can be a little disengaged in class.
He said teachers were becoming digital curators, and his gamification app blends augmented reality and play to empower them.
Arludo creates a library of apps that teachers can use in the classroom to engage students in STEM topics.
Hosonto Middleware is an end-to-end development platform for web and mobile applications that utilise a patent pending Automated Model View framework. It automates much of the development work so developers can focus on the important and relevant tasks of the application.
Start-up Ontoto is an advanced water- tracking solution to measure water levels and temperatures.
Smart Grid Energy has created a solar power metering system developed by Enopte to tackle the rising cost of power. The system can save users up to 30 per cent through access to demand management controls and detailed information on energy consumption and generation.