Imperial Innovations: Two spin-out companies win recognition

The Imperial Innovations portfolio company Cortexica Vision Systems, a spin-out from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, has won the TechCrunch Europe 2010 Start-Up Pitch Competition.

The competition was hosted by 4iP, the innovation fund of the television company Channel 4, with Microsoft BizSpark and UK Trade & Investment. Cortexica pitched its technology and business strategy to a panel of venture capitalists and technologists, including representatives from Google and other industry leaders.

The company’s WINEfindr, an iPhone App that enables price comparison of wine, won as a demonstrator of Visual Search on the iPhone, with CEO Steve Semenzato delivering the pitch.

Meanwhile, Novacem, the Imperial spin-out which is developing carbon-negative cement, featured in the annual Top 10 Emerging Technologies ranking in the Technology Review magazine, published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The cement Novacem is developing not only reduces the amount of CO2 produced by kilns fired during its creation, but also absorbs and locks away atmospheric CO2 on hardening. It was developed by Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, with whom Imperial Innovations worked to create Novacem and spin it out.

In July 2009, Imperial Innovations, the London Technology Fund and the Royal Society Enterprise Fund have put in £1 million in a funding round to help commercialise the technology. As a result of the investment, Novacem has been able to expand the team and accelerate the development of its product.

Conventional Portland cement, which requires higher kiln temperatures and releases CO2 as it sets, is estimated to contribute up to 5 per cent of global CO2 emissions every year. For every tonne of Portland cement replaced by Novacem cement, up to 0.75 tonnes of CO2 could be captured and stored indefinitely. This will transform the cement industry from a significant emitter of CO2 to a significant absorber.