Ollo Mobile’s co-founder Hugh Geiger is off to Silicon Valley today to explore funding and distribution partners to take his start-up to the next level.
Ollo Mobile is a device and platform for elderly care. Geiger describes it as a familial evolution on the panic button system, which he says is under-used by elderly patients because they find the call centre system intimidating.
“We feel like we’re first with our approach, and we want to be recognised as first, both here and in the United States,” Geiger told StartupSmart.
The team won the trip after they took out top honours in the Rackspace Small Team Big Impact pitching competition in August.
Geiger adds he encourages almost every start-up he meets now to enter the Rackspace competition.
“We’re really grateful to them for the profile of the event. They generated a lot of interest and encourage start-ups to make an effort to be involved,” Geiger says. “We’re launching a crowd funding campaign and talking to potential investors and distributors. We’re going over there to try and establish ourselves as the leader in this particular space,” Geiger says.
The win was one of many for Ollo Mobile, who embarked on a pitching competition campaign to boost awareness and make connections earlier this year. They also won the CeBIT Australia pitching competition, the TiE Go Asia pitching event and are finalists for the upcoming Tech23 Competition.
“We got really involved in the competition and IT circuit to build profile around what we’re doing in anticipation for the crowdfunding campaign to show we have credibility and track record,” Geiger says.
The Ollo Mobile team is still considering if they need to move to the US for their product and start-up to reach its potential.
“It’s still in the air. One of the issues we have here is the speed of the market, as things move quite slowly here generally,” Geiger says. “What we’re doing is a bit different and finding investors with experience in our space and access to the market channels has been difficult here as it is such a small community and what we’re doing is quite specialised.”
The team plan to launch their product and service in six months, but the launch will be dependent on funding.
“We can’t beta test easily as it puts people’s health and well-being at risk, so we need to polish first and test in a controlled way first, but the plan is in six months,” Geiger says. “We have a fixed development cycle, and when that cycle starts will depend on funding.”
Rose is the current head of growth at Rampersand Ventures. She was formerly a reporter at StartupSmart.
