We've won the $100k EBRD Covid Challenge!
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, through its Star Venture programme, launched the Startup Innovation Challenge in response to the coronavirus back in November. The pitching happened December 17th and I'm proud to announce that we are one of the 5 winners, out of 225 that applied.
We'll receive $100,000 plus mentoring, access to international investors, and customer intros.
In case you're wondering, I've adjusted our pitch deck to include a use case from one of our customers, the University of Strathclyde from Glasgow. Faced with the government decision that all students that change households during holidays should be tested for COVID, the university was able to quickly put in place a system to allow 20,000 students to schedule 2 appointments, 3 to 5 days apart, handle the no-show cases, control the number of students on the same slots, record results, dashboards and KPIs, etc. In other words, a fairly complex system.
They went live with it in just 2 days! When I interviewed the IT team at the University, they mentioned that they have other low-code tools in their inventory, but they choose Plant an App because it was the only tool that could get the job done so fast. With other low-code tools, they would have had to bring in the development team, which would have changed the process entirely to Agile Scrum. But with 2-week long iteration loops, the system would have taken at least one month to go live, well beyond their deadline.
These are the kind of stories that drive us to push on our mission to democratize development in order to make it possible to deliver systems as fast as one imagines its capabilities.