Review of London's first Retail Technology investor meet-up from Validify

 
Review of London's first Retail Technology investor meet-up from Validify
On Tuesday, 16th June I visited the first Retail Tech Matchup event hosted by Validify and Match Capita on London's Old Broad Street. The format for the evening consisted of 3 opening presentations from Match Capital, Ometria and Google followed by 5 pitches from retail technology startups. Match Capital opened with some great advice on how a tech startup should approach raising investment. The key takeaway here was that investment rounds are likely to occupy more resource from your execs that you probably ever anticipated. Ometria then presented some insight into the world of retail technology. Ometria raised the question: Why should you build your own e-commerce platform these days? The e-commerce platform was no longer a point of differentiation, rather it was the way you operated the platform. The future is Retail as a Service (RaaS). Finally Google presented some interesting insight from the world of internet shopping and the influence of digital marketing. Did you know craigslist cost the newspaper business $5.4bn between 2000 and 2007? Google also provided an interesting stat on the rise of internet video - video views per month doubled in the 3 years between 2010 and 2013 (from 6bn to 12bn views per month). After the 3 opening presentations was the main event - the Retail Matchup itself. The main event was 5 startups in the retail technology space who each took 10 minutes to pitch their proposition. Each presenter gave compelling reasons on why you should invest in their ventures. The presentations were from Boscabox, Frock Advisor, Goodvidio, StorIQ & My Gravity, each who had quite different propositions and presented with all the energy you would expect from a group of entrepreneurs. The post event drinks and canapés gave the audience of both investors and startups the opportunity to mingle and network. Overall a great event and thoroughly good use of a Tuesday evening. I'm already looking forward to the next event in September. For more details of Retail Tech Matchup please see the Retail Tech Matchup website and the Retail MatchUp twitter feed.

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