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Engineering

Engineering graduates placed among world’s elite startups at Y Combinator

Published: 25 March 2019
YSplit Founders
(l-r) Ysplit co-founders Tunde Alao, Boateng Opoku-Yeboah and Landon Vago-Hughes.

Startup founders from the University of Southampton have taken their place among the world’s best ventures at Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator accelerator.

Former student entrepreneurs from Ysplit - formerly Cluttr - and Aura Vision outshone thousands of candidates to join the latest cohort of the world-famous accelerator, which has launched countless global brands including Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit.

Ysplit has combined the talents of three engineering and computer science graduates to develop a virtual card which shares transactions between groups of friends, while Aura Vision has built upon postgraduate research in the School of Electronics and Computer Science to produce a visitor analytics platform for retail stores.

The startups, which were both nurtured in the University’s Future Worlds on-campus accelerator, have each received a $150,000 investment and are now valued at over $2 million. They presented to a select audience of investors and press at Y Combinator’s renowned Demo Day on Monday 18th March as they completed a three-month journey refining products that were first devised during their studies.

Ysplit creates virtual cards to use with groups, simplifying recurring payments by charging everyone separately. The startup was co-founded by entrepreneurs Landon Vago-Hughes, Boateng Opoku-Yeboah and Tunde Alao, having developed the idea during their studies in Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics and Computer Science. The trio impressed investors at a Dragons’ Den-style pitching event in 2018 and were one of two businesses led by engineering students to be pledged a combined £150,000 in the competition.

“We’ve come a long way since we first pitched Cluttr at Future Worlds Dragons’ Den and our offering has developed to not just track but solve the payment problems that houses face,” Tunde says. “With a YSplit card, everyone will pay their share of the transaction automatically when the card is charged. I have been following Y Combinator for as long as I can remember and have always been impressed by the mentality of its startups. We have been growing as much as possible during the programme and our next milestone will be to hire more engineers and release hundreds of cards over the coming weeks.”

Aura Vision helps retailers measure their audience in unprecedented detail, by using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques on existing camera systems to provide precise visitor insights for footfall, heat maps, peel-off rates, area dwell times and service wait times. The startup was co-founded by Daniel Martinho-Corbishley and Jaime Lomeli during their PhDs in the Vision, Learning and Control Research Group.

“The opportunity to join a world-leading US accelerator has put us in a very strong position to scale our sales pipeline in a retail market that is ten times larger than in the UK,” Daniel says. “Y Combinator is designed to slingshot you toward Demo Day and we a raring to go in front of the hottest angels and venture capitalists in the Valley.

“It’s been a hard graft in the 18 months since we handed in our theses, but we feel so lucky to have been able to commercialise what we first started in Southampton. Our product is in live deployment with paying customers and we are always developing and improving our offer, so expect some exciting announcements in the next few months.”

Y Combinator has invested in over 1,900 companies since its launch in 2005, with Ysplit and Aura Vision taking their place in the winter 2019 cohort. To date, the accelerator has helped launch 93 companies that are now valued at over $100 billion, directly leading to the creation of over 28,000 jobs worldwide.

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