In October, we were thrilled to learn that we’d been shortlisted as finalists for the 2018 BMWi UK Tech Founder Awards – EdTech category.
It was one of the largest categories, with founders of eight companies shortlisted, and the event organisers gave absolutely no hints that we might have won, so it came as a genuine, wonderful surprise at the gala dinner (27th November) when we were announced as the winners.
The category was introduced with a talk by the extraordinary and inspiring UK tech entrepreneur, Jessica Butcher MBE (co-founder of Blippar, the world’s leading AR/computer vision technology) who gave us the award:
Jess Butcher MBE (left), Gruff Davies (me, middle) and Simon Potter (right, sporting a rather tremendous new beard)
The award is now proudly on display flanked by Kwiziq’s adorable mascots, KwizBot and Robetta, the friendly robot faces of our AI language coaching technology.
Robetta and KwizBot with Kwiziq EdTech Founder of the Year Award
We feel honoured and humbled. The judges commented, “Gareth and Simon have a fascinating entrepreneurial story. Like so many entrepreneurs they’ve experienced failure in the past, but haven’t been deterred in their ambition to scale. They have an admirable journey. Congratulations!”.
Our enormous gratitude goes to the organisers, the judges, Kwiziq’s incredibly loyal users, and of course everyone in Team Kwiziq, our investors, and our friends and family, all of whom have contributed immeasurably to making Kwiziq the success it has become.
It’s been an amazing year for Kwiziq. Earlier in the year were named as top 3 finalists for CognitionX’s Best AI Product in Education for the second year running, and the UK government recognised Kwiziq as a leading British startup in their policy paper on AI.
It’s a terrific way to end the year and we can’t wait to see what 2019 will bring!
Author info
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.
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