It is a shortlist of finalists demonstrating outstanding innovation, creativity and talent.

A wealth of amazing organisations, businesses and individuals entered our inaugural West Midlands Tech Awards, led by Reach plc’s BirminghamLive and CoventryLive websites.

Our prestigious panel of judges, led by Dave Maclean – West Midlands Combined Authority Digital Board Chair and Packt Publishing CEO – were overwhelmed by the stunning standard of entries.

They spent hours carefully deliberating the nominations to collate this shortlist of excellence, full of candidates who truly represent the exciting developments in our region’s fastest growing industry.

Marc Reeves – West Midlands editor-in-chief for Reach plc – said: “I am thrilled at the standard of entries for our inaugural West Midlands Tech Awards led by BirminghamLive and CoventryLive.

“There truly are some remarkable companies in our region that are creating some amazing services and products that will ensure the West Midlands’ tech industry thrives.

“The innovation is spectacular and I am delighted that we are celebrating the fantastic achievements of these companies and individuals.”

The headline sponsor of our inaugural event is NatWest.

The West Midlands has the biggest Tech Sector outside London – employing 80,000 people with 13,500 tech businesses – and has potential to become a major global digital hub.

Earlier this year the region was awarded £75 million of investment from Government – to be issued in two phases – to develop 5G, with investment matched by mobile technology firms.

The West Midland Tech Awards will be held at ICC Birmingham

The winners of the West Midlands Tech Awards will be unveiled at an informal and engaging evening ceremony at the ICC on December 13.

Tickets to West Midlands Tech Awards cost £50 (+VAT). Finalists receive a complimentary ticket. To order click here

Here are the finalists for our inaugural West Midlands Tech Awards

Digital Start up of the year

Sponsored by Innovation Birmingham

Comesto

Showcases new independent food and drink trade suppliers, offering to help forge deals to save clients time and money. Works with suppliers and buyers.

Fluence World

A deep-tech start-up founded by Aston University alumni.

Uses advanced technologies to improve the quality, efficiency, and relevance of teaching and learning.

Supermeal

A global food deals and discovery platform which launched in the UK in 2015, after beginning in South Asia.

Rewards takeaway lovers with cashback on delivery orders and helps restaurants reach customers and encourage loyalty.

Describe themselves as the black horse in the Food Delivery Platforms.

Digital Investor of the year

Sponsored by Robert Walters

Colmore Tang Construction

Contractor which has created a £10 million innovation fund to invest in start-ups and new businesses

Midven

Focuses on the early stage, technology and SME markets, capitalising on expertise gained from being established as a venture capitalist firm in 1993 by six Midland entrepreneurs.

Has created 25 millionaires by offering a ‘more than money approach’.

Is confident in Birmingham’s capabilities to thrive, with the city being home to the greatest entrepreneurial activity outside London, boasting a £230 billion economy.

West Midlands Tech Award 2018 judging day: Dave Maclean (Packt Publishing)

Digital Business of the year

Sponsored by NatWest

Intouch Games Ltd

Has more than 2 million players across its brand, establishing itself as a dominant force within the eGaming industry, through advancing digital capabilities and delivering technological innovation and adopting a player focused approach to business.

Headquarters are in Halesowen.

PM Connect

Award-winning provider of mobile payment solutions based in Longbridge.

Allows users to pay for lifestyle and sport content, tickets, videos and articles through carrier billing.

Currently processes two million payments per month for clients and driving growth into Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa.

Has bespoke subscription sites for sporting giants WWE and NBA.

Group CEO James Macfarlane founded PM Connect straight out of university, and has since won the Rising Star Award in the Midlands division of EY Entrepreneur Of The Year awards.

sales-i

A unique cloud-based sales analytics solution that proactively tracks and monitors customer purchasing behaviour.

This is fed by a user's accounting package, equipping companies with instant insight into their customers and prospects.

Headquartered in Solihull sales-i is hosted entirely in the Cloud, simply due to the incredible level of scaling, resilience and redundancy that it can offer.

From automotive suppliers and builders’ merchants to janitorial wholesalers and breweries, sales-i has transformed sales and business processes worldwide.

sales-i has grown at an incredible rate, from a Midlands start-up with five employees in 2008 to an international software powerhouse with 100+staff between two offices in the UK and USA.

Tickets to West Midlands Tech Awards cost £50 (+VAT). Finalists receive a complimentary ticket. To order click here

Innovation in Education

Enploy

Develops entrepreneurial skills to help young people and communities to succeed wth online diagnostics, a learning and development platform, face-to-face workshops and insight and analysis.

Has enabled 525 people to gain insight, grow their entrepreneurial abilities and improve their employability for meaningful employment.

Learning Labs

A team of former teachers, linguists, techies and professionals exploring how the latest technology can make language more accessible to every student.

Helps UK teachers who struggle with the challenge of one in five pupils not speaking English as their first language.

Developed FlashAcademy® EAL, the first platform to deliver curriculum mapped English from over 30 home languages –working across PC’s and tablets.

School of Code

Offers a free 16 week coding boot camp – open to all, no experience needed.

Aims to help more people from different backgrounds get into technology and benefit from the industry.

Received 300+ applications from a wide range of people, including a 50:50 gender split and age-range of 18-60 and took on 19, including a return-to-work mum, refugee, school leaver ,warehouse worker, unemployed, baker, graduates, retail workers, personal trainer, artist, musician, PhD, and probation court officer.

Has also run homeless coding classes with Crisis, elderly tech classes, and also previously a Summer of Code with the BBC.

West Midlands Tech Award 2018 judging day: Sarah Windrum (Emerald Group) and Marc Reeves (Birmingham Live)

Innovation in Manufacturing

Sponsored by Severn Trent

C. Brandauer & Co Ltd

Independent high-precision metal component specialist which has used technology to reduce the time and cost involved in tool maintenance, increasing competitiveness and broadening potential markets

Jaguar Land Rover

Led project to design and develop manufacturing and assembly technologies and techniques to enhance production of electric machines

Also invested £1 billion in a new world-class Engine Manufacturing Centre

Innovation in Public Services

Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust

Improved patient safety on dementia wards at night by 100% through Oxehealth’s Digital Care Assistant which uses a optical sensor placed unobtrusively in a room, and alerts staff to patients getting out of bed and tracking night-time activity

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire

Developed in house app called CareClox to improve nursing and midwifery patient care - analysing time spent delivering direct care and reducing tasks that detracted from patient care

West Midlands Bus Alliance

National Express West Midland and Transport West Midlands introduced contactless technology on all 1,600 buses in April - resulting in one million contactless payments, speeding up bus journeys by 10%. Fares are automatically capped at the daysaver rate.

Tickets to West Midlands Tech Awards cost £50 (+VAT). Finalists receive a complimentary ticket. To order click here

Innovation in Medicine and Health

Sponsored by Aston University

Professor Bob Stone

Heading up world-leading, innovative Virtual Reality research and development by University of Birmingham’s Human Interface Technologies Team to support cognitive and physical rehabilitation of intensive care unit patients following traumatic injury or complex injury.

The team has also collaborated with the UK’s Defence Medical Services to develop an internationally acclaimed Mixed Reality approach to training for Medical Emergency Response Teams, which could help civilian emergency specialists.

It has also developing a Virtual Fantasy Garden Quest for children suffering with chronic pain.

SDS MyHealthcare and Substrakt Health

Substrakt Health provides a range of digital solutions for the NHS to improve patient experience and transform delivery of healthcare, and works with SDS MyHealthcare, a Birmingham GP provider covering 400,000 patients.

Its patient facing apps, messaging solutions and video consultation platforms enable patients to book appointments, order and manage medication and monitor thier key lifestyle risk factors among other benefits

Unique IQ

Saves carers’ time with IQ: Passive technology which enables them to ‘passively’ clock in and clock out of visits to patients, removing a key process and ensuring that attendance data and tangible evidence is collated without fail

West Midlands Tech Award 2018 judging day

Innovation in Arts and Culture

Lily Wales

Integrates technology into artwork and is currently featuring lighting systems triggered by motion sensors into sculpture at STEAMHouse.

Collaborated with Innovation Engine 2 to develop a water mechanism with raspberry pi technology for a sculpture on display at New Art Gallery Walsall.

Has been awarded £10,000 from the Developing Your Creative Practice fund from the Arts Council to use raspberry pi and artuino technology, which she is using to travel to Japan and research human and computer interaction and technological advances

Ludic Rooms

Digital Artists in residence for Coventry’s 2021 City of Culture Bid creating a series of engaging artworks for the city centre.

Included Buddy Bench, which encouraged chat between strangers by rewarding conversation with warm seats and a massage.

And they hacked motorised scooters to respond to sound, so that the louder participants screamed, the faster they travelled.

There was also Nod Bins which rewarded good behaviour of disposing of rubbish responsibly with positive sound effects.

Talking Birds

Coventry theatre company has developed new tool to make performances and events accessible to deaf, hard-of-hearing or partially sighted audience members.

The Difference Engine delivers captioning or audio description direct to their mobile devices.

Developed by artists for artists to give more people the chance to access experimental outdoor, small scale or immersive performance.

Demand has increased daily and it has been used aroud the country.

E-Commerce site of the year

Castle Fine Art

Online business has grown substantially and it has built a bespoke web platform from scratch enabling transactions worldwide.

Comesto

Creates digital marketing campaigns to drive traffic to clients’ websites.

Aimed at the Food & Beverage and Hospitality industries, with a client base of over 2,000 producers and buyers.

Inclues one client who has signed up to supply a pub chain thanks to help from Comesto.

Ellisons Hair and Beauty

A leading UK supplier to hair and beauty professionals which has undertaken a £500,000 web platform upgrade to deliver products to customers.

West Midlands Tech Award 2018 judging day: Richard Hill (NatWest)

Tickets to West Midlands Tech Awards cost £50 (+VAT). Finalists receive a complimentary ticket. To order click here

Digital Young Person of the year

Sponsored by CarCloud

Chris Meah, School of Code

Started the School of Code to help spread the benefits of the tech industry.

More than 100,000 pupils use it and it helps teachers bring code into the classroom.

Has also run coding classes for the homeless with Crisis, children’s summer camps with the BBC, elderly tech classes.

The biggest impact he has had is the free 16 week West Midlands School of Code Bootcamp which achieved an amazing 90% employment rate in tech.

He has also started Cogcept (an AI consultancy) which has grown to 5 people and is helping organisations in the West Midlands take advantage of AI.

Chris began the School of Code while finishing his PhD at University of Birmingham, which he finished last year after completing his BSc in AI and MSc.

He has joined the WMCA Digital Board, and has won awards including “Outstanding Tech Individual” at the Greater Birmingham Tech Awards and “Transforming Lives Through Partnerships” at the Education Awards.

Daniel Kirby, GuyKat

Twenty-one-year-old eLearning designer at GuyKat, which he joined straight from school as an apprentice.

Jumped from Junior Deeloper to full developer in a year and is now one of the most advanced developers in the office.

He creates graphics, edits videos, designs quizzing, navigates the problems of HTML5 animations, executes JavaScript commands and builds custom interactivity.

He has mastered new authoring tools in days, and, has become one of the most competent Adobe Captivate eLearning developers in the UK.

Produces quality, cutting-edge eLearning for some of the world’s biggest brands such as Mondelez, Unilever, Veon and Amnesty International.

Waqar Shah, Supermeal

Started out wanting to express his love of technology and computer science through his own company.

Built his Supermeal business up from the ground with little to no funding, his main goal being to bring value to restaurant owners through his services.

By providing free websites and commission free Apps, Supermeal aims to give back the identity of these small restaurant owners so that they can promote their own brands and gain their own customers.

Supermeal also works for customers, by rewarding them with cashback offers, prizes and competitions.

West Midlands Tech Award 2018 judging day: Roy Meredith (West Midlands Growth Company)

West Midlands Woman in Tech Award

Sponsored by Askews

Cerys Johnson, REPL Group

Since joining Henley-in-Arden based global technonogy solutions company REPL Cerys has worked her way through front line project delivery roles to become CEO.

REPL works works with some of the biggest names in retail and has seen its turnover increase by over 30% and profit increase by over 100%

REPL has been recognized by the London Stock Exchange Group as one of the top 1000 companies inspiring Britain for a second year running.

The Coventry & Warwickshire growth barometer, tracking growth of leading performers the county, has ranked REPL in 12th place.

REPL has featured in the Sunday Times SME Export Track for the third year running, climbing from 46th place last year, to 28th place this year.

Cerys has set up a Women in REPL group as an internal community providing support and inspiration for the women working in REPL as well as an ideas factory for attracting women to work in REPL and to encourage young women to consider technology as an attractive career option.

She is also an enthusiastic supporter of the Young Enterprise scheme.

Tickets to West Midlands Tech Awards cost £50 (+VAT). Finalists receive a complimentary ticket. To order click here

Jane Fallon, PSDM

Previously worked for the Government Digital Service (GDS), moving back to Birmingham after having twins and taking up a post as Head of Digital for a central government team in the city.

Frustrated at a lack of join up between central and local government and emergency service teams she set about creating a collaborative movement to showcase digital work from each sector across the MIdlands.

The first PSDM was held on 27 September, with no budget or funding from government, but was supported by teams kee to share and learn.

Through promotion of the events on LinkedIn and Twitter, Jane got offers of sponsorship which allowed PSDM to have merchandise and promotional materials.

The event featured high profile speakers, including Andy Street, mayor of the West Midlands, which helped garner interest from wider digital communities.

PSDM had an all female Midlands digital leaders panel – almost unheard of in tech conferences – which was well received.

The 250 tickets were snapped up on eventbrite, and there were additional attendees on the day.

PSDM collaborated with Government Digital Services, West Midlands Combined Authority, volunteers from HMCTS, the Gambling Commission and Office of the Public Guardian (all based in Birmingham).

It also linked up with private sector organisations and consultancies in Birmingham who supported with event management.

The event was all organised and put together in a matter of months, on top of everyone’s day jobs.

There was lost of positive feedback on twitter at #psdmidlands, includng: “Today has been a fantastic day for digital teams from across the Midlands to get together and build new connections, communities and collaboration. We now need to push forward and make stuff happen.”

Jane said: “#psdmidlands West Midlands can and does cut through red tape, challenge industry norms and use digital apprenticeships to solve the skills gap in public sector tech

“We now have a platform in which to take this campaign for midlands public sector digital further and people who want to be part of that journey.”

Sarah Dowzell, Natural HR

A mother, entrepreneur and now Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Birmingham-based company, Natural HR.

The company provides cloud-based software to medium-sized businesses and was born out of Sarah’s need for a HR system when she ran a cleaning business in 2009.

Significant investment in Natural HR in 2016 catapulted the business to new heights.

It now serves 200 companies and has seen 100% grown year on year and has reached a £1million milestone in total revenue.

With her two year-old son Finn in tow, Sarah has seen her office space grow from being empty to being full of passionate tech and HR professionals.

Sarah studied her Business Studies degree while being a full time mum to two boys and numerous HR qualifications with the CIPD.

Her husband’s tech knowledge helped her start out.

Sarah hopes her involvement in a tech business inspires other women into the industry, as well as into leadership roles more broadly.

West Midlands Tech Award 2018 judging day: Tim Kay (KPMG)

Prop Tech of the year

Biosite

Providing integrated hardware and software technology solutions, to improve workforce management, safety and security in the construction sector.

Li Wang, 40, and Greg Reynolds, 36, who studied at Warwick University and the University of Birmingham respectively, established Biosite in 2010 and have overseen sales rising to £6.4m in 2017, and expected to reach £10.8m in 2018.

Biosite also acquired the software firm Mosaic in March 2018 and has overseas expansion plans for Europe, the US and Australia.

Biosite’s 150 employees at its Solihull headquarters have developed biometric fingerprint recognition software aligned to an access control system and online portal. This creates a unique ‘one person, one profile’ structure, that provides its customers with greater visibility of their workforce’s skills and training.

It has also developed and EN54 certified fire safety solution.

The company provides these services to many of the UK’s leading construction companies such as Wates, Morgan Sindall, HS2, Balfour Beatty, BAM and Costain.

The technology is now used on more than 1,000 construction sites across the UK, on projects as varied as the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, football stadiums and Westfield shopping centres.

Biosite also recently donated the system free of charge to the DIY SOS team at Grenfell.

CrowdProperty

CrowdProperty’s vision is to build a more rewarding financial era whilst making a lasting, significant contribution to society, enabled by innovative, scalable technology.

Property professionals are struggling to access development funding whilst retail investors are receiving poor interest rates, due to high banking overhead costs.

CrowdProperty was built to tackle these fundamental issues, offering lenders and borrowers better deals through a tech-driven, efficient peer-to-peer lending platform.

CrowdProperty provides quick, easy yet robustly assessed finance to property professionals whilst giving investors superior, secured returns, thereby increasing the funding for much needed British housing supply.

Its founders are seasoned property experts with almost 100 years collective experience.

CrowdProperty was founded in Birmingham in 2014.

It has funded 55 projects.

The team has grown from four to 25.

CrowdProperty is authorised and regulated bythe FCA and the only property development platform member of the P2PFA.

CrowdProperty says its greatest achievement is facilitating the building of 423 Great British homes worth £64,800,000.

Nimbus®

The team believe that every person with a vested interest or role in property can create greater economic and social benefits by using data and technology.

They want to show them how.

The Nimbus® vision is to inspire and engage people with the power of data, technology and their passion for property.

Nimbus® has created a market leading property information platform called Nimbus® Maps which not only gives users easy access to a massive aggregated and tremendously useful data set of property intelligence (from 1000+ data sources) but also invests heavily in training the users on how to get the most from the information.

Current user numbers are c20,000, having grown from only c2,000 at the beginning of January 2018, and it is growing at about 1,500 per week.

This rate will increase further following the completion of a recent fund-raise and get wider market adoption into the predicted two million people working in the property industry.

The business is fully capitalised to scale massively in both the UK and further afield. The company’s core target is to have five property technology products in 10 countries using AI for predictions all being adopted through automation by 31/03/2023.

Tickets to West Midlands Tech Awards cost £50 (+VAT). Finalists receive a complimentary ticket. To order click here