FIFTEEN Scottish businesses secured grants of up to £50,000 after making successful pitches in a Dragon's Den style competition.
The funds were handed out at the culmination of the final of this year's Scottish EDGE awards, run by Scottish Enterprise, which saw start-ups compete for a share of a £660,000 pot.
The final saw 30 Scottish companies make their case for funding before a judging panel at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Conference Centre at Gogarburn in Edinburgh. They each made a three-minute pitch following a seven-minute Q&A with the judges.
Sitting on this year's panel were Chris van der Kuyl, chairman of Entrepreneurial Scotland (ES), Ewan Brown, chairman of Scottish Financial Enterprise, Paul Lewis, Ken Barclay and Lucinda Bruce Gardyne, founder of gluten-free food brand Genius.
Seven companies secured grants of £50,000, including Hebridean Spa, a maker of spa products. It will use its £50,000 prize to employ a sales manager, move to larger premises and attend conferences to promote the brand in the US.
Technology firm Airts will use its £50,000 to employ two software engineers and invest in hardware, while Mo's Cookie Dough, which donates a percentage of its profits to projects helping vulnerable children, will hire a commercial director and operations assistant.
Six of the companies which won this year belong to Entrepreneurial Spark (E-Spark), the acceleration programme for early stage and growing ventures. The E-Spark start-ups walked off with £246,000 of funding.
Six cash awards were presented separately to young entrepreneurs aged 18 to 30 past part of the Young EDGE scheme, co-ordinated by The Prince's Trust. Ten grants ranging from £3,000 to £9,500 were presented under this scheme after 25 firms made pitches, judged by a separate panel.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article