Filament STAC – the Scottish IoT accelerator aiming to produce scalable companies – has added to its cohort, bringing the total to 14.

Vanora Robots and Aquaponics Garden are the latest additions, with the former designing and manufacturing robots aimed at improving health and safety efficiencies including air and surface sanitation, while the latter is Scotland’s first aquaponic vertical farming technology company.

Filament STAC has also strengthened its executive team with a number of key hires.  Nick Noble, formerly a senior marketing executive at IBM Watson and Salesforce, has joined STAC as Business Development and Marketing Mentor. Martin MacDonald, who previously held a series of senior positions in sales and business development at Honeywell and Dialog Semi, has been hired as an Executive Mentor.

Finally, Aileen Biagi, a product development specialist and longstanding lecturer in Product Design Engineering at Glasgow School of Art, has joined STAC as Product Development Mentor.

Filament STAC CEO Paul Wilson said: “It’s great to see STAC really take off as we move into the second quarter of our first year of operations. We are really pleased to have Vanora and Aquaponics Garden join the cohort, and it’s also great news to have Nick, Martin, and Aileen on board.”

Among recent STAC cohort successes, University of Strathclyde cybersecurity spinout Lupovis secured a £615,000 pre-seed investment at the end of 2021 co-led by Techstart Ventures and Nauta Capital.

Also, wearable device startup Toto Sleep’s founder Victoria Fullarton secured £150,000 from businesswomen Sara Davies on BBC’s Dragons’ Den in January and is now taking pre-orders. Also, fitness specialist BGR is preparing to ship orders to over 50 countries worldwide.

Paul Wilson added: “BGR is a great example of the strength of our industry partners being harnessed for our STAC companies. Burness Paull, Scintilla, and Anderson Anderson Brown have all supported BGR around international compliance, with Twilio helping to accelerate new product development.”

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David White, CEO and founder of BGR, said: “STAC has been transformational for BGR, essentially around the calibre of the industry partners and how we have been able to draw on their expertise to fulfil international shipments.”

Filament STAC is a government-industry partnership. The Scottish IoT accelerator has a three-year target to create more than 25 IoT companies supporting around 750 jobs, reporting revenue in the region of £750 million, and cohort companies raising investment in excess of £100 million.

The initiative is supported by Scottish Enterprise, CENSIS (Scotland’s Innovation Centre for sensing, imaging and IoT technologies), and Glasgow-headquartered product design firm Filament.  STAC’s local partners in Scotland include Anderson Anderson & Brown, Burness Paull, Scintilla, Arceptive, Soben, and Integrated Graphene.

The companies in Filament STAC’s first cohort are: Acu-Flow (trading as Nebu-Flow), Lupovis, Gibson Robotics, Toto Sleep, Lynkeos, Radisoft, WashR, Jirasoft, BGR; 5G3i, Fyne Labs, Soltropy, Vanora Robots, and Aquaponics Garden.

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