Seven teams of entrepreneurs and researchers received a total of €100,000 during the fourth edition of the Takeoff Seed Fund Awards. The presentations were made  recently by Economy Minister Chris Cardona at the University of Malta’s Takeoff Business Incubator.

The minister said it was encouraging to see the new ventures were in a variety of different areas.

“Malta is brimming with innovative ideas and technologies, and the ministry is delighted to play its part in supporting the best performing teams and assisting them in taking these innovations closer to market,” Dr Cardona said.

He augured that with the guidance they receive at the business incubator, some of the start-up ventures will develop into successful companies employing local workers and make a significant contribution to the economy.

University rector Alfred Vella, who presided over the awards ceremony, said that the University actively supported entrepreneurship and research commercialisation in various ways. These include specialised degrees, such as the master’s degree in knowledge-based entrepreneurship, study units in entrepreneurship offered across various degree programmes, and active hands-on assistance available at the Takeoff Business Incubator and through the Knowledge Transfer Office.

“These initiatives, together with the funds available through programmes such as the Takeoff Seed Fund Award, have already started producing some success stories and we look forward to witnessing an increasing number of these in the future,” Prof. Vella said.

There were 43 submissions for the Seed Fund and the top 14 were selected to pitch their ideas to the adjudication board.

There were two winners of the Proof of Concept category. The first was Assiduity, a software package that will enable intelligent searching of large databases of legal texts, which will be applied initially to the Laws of Malta; the second was TDRpro, which involves the design of a time domain reflectometer probe that is based on the interaction of electromagnetic fields and the material under test.

The winners of the Seed Fund category were the following:

• Fetch A Service, an online platform designed to allow people and businesses with tight schedules to outsource some of their daily chores to individuals willing to provide the service for a fee;

•  PropertyMarket.com.mt, which provides easy access to up-to-date information on the real estate market and enables real estate agencies to effectively market their services;

• inMalta.Travel, a one-stop-shop that allows visitors to the Maltese islands to plan their trip with minimum effort by showcasing activities offered by the wide pool of service providers;

• Eliiss, a luxury service provider with its hub in Malta, that organises and coordinates once-in-a-lifetime bespoke vacations; and

• Toma, that aims to design, produce and sell novel foods based on sheep’s milk and combined with local flavours.

The Takeoff Seed Fund Award is a joint initiative of the University of Malta’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Business Incubation and the Ministry for the Economy, Industry and Small Business, supported by the University’s Takeoff Business Incubator.

The award ceremony was also attended by Nancy Caruana, permanent secretary at the Economy Ministry, Saviour Zammit, pro-rector for Research and Knowledge Transfer, Takeoff manager Joseph Bartolo and Anton Bartolo, director of the Knowledge Transfer Office.