The Celtic Challenge

This years Dragons Den session is being hosted in partnership with the Ulster Bank Entrepreneur Accelerator Programme.

Out of 320 entrepreneurs who pitched across four cities – Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff- 4 start-ups have been chosen to pitch to our dragons on November 30th at The Belfast Harbour Commissioners.

Book your conference pass to join us!

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The Dragons


Mike Brewster M.D
Brewster Financial Strategies Group, Wells Fargo Advisors, New York
Mary Ann Pierce
Founder & CEO, MAP Digital
Denis Murphy
Founder Anaeko
Orla Smyth
Founder Kaffe-O

The Pitching Start Ups

Donti Dental

Donti harnesses the latest technologies to provide a new, premium dental care experience for you and your family.

Using the state of the art Donti dental scanner connected to our smartphone app, Donti allows you to monitor and maintain your whitest smile from the comfort of your home.

Donti provides tools created by experts to ensure you have the best habits to maintain a perfect oral health.

Donti is a multi-award winning start-up from Innovative Healthcare Solutions, a company established in 2015 in Scotland. The start-up is at pre-revenue stage currently working on its seed funding following a £105k Scottish Enterprise SMART Grant. Company’s prototype Scanner and Smartphone app has been tested and is ready for demonstration at request.

Proud Pads

Proud Pads are sustainable sanitary pads for modern life: hassle free, comfortable and stylish. Proud Pads can be machine washed for five years, potentially reducing the 200,000 tonnes of period waste create in the UK every year by 97%. The pads are much more comfortable as they’re made from fabric, not plastic like disposables, so feel soft on the skin, allow it to breathe and don’t irritate it.

Laura discovered a gap in the market for Proud Pads while researching sustainable period products for her backpacking trip around Asia. She used the garment production skills she learnt while studying fashion design at university to create her innovative, eco friendly sanitary pad.

Proud Pads will initially be sold through the company’s online shop and independent zero waste, vegan and women’s health shops throughout the country. The company will be targeting supermarket and pharmacy chains in their second year. Laura won Innovate UK’s Young Innovator’s award, has spoken about Proud Pads at TEDx and is a member of the Natwest Entrepreneur Accelerator. The product is ready to go to market and Proud Pads are finalising a manufacturer, having carried out extensive market research with 90% of testers saying they’ll buy more.

Casta Spes Technologies (CST)

Casta Spes Technologies (CST) is a robotics company based in Edinburgh that produces unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) for autonomous data collection. Our vision is to empower humanity through autonomy by enabling accessible robotics. Our first product, Mantis, is a robotic surveillance vehicle that will monitor, survey and patrol perimeters reliably.

CST was founded by Selby Cary (MEng Mechanical) and Michael McDonald (BEng Mechanical-Electrical) who have worked in a range of industries from automotive to banking. Since its inception, CST has won various awards and competitions, raised seed investment and generated partnerships with some big names in security.

Selby Cary is the co-founder and CEO of CST. Selby is a serial entrepreneur, inventor and engineer with a passion for robotics and automated systems. He grew up in both Zimbabwe and Zambia, where he discovered his curiosity for technology, completing his Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. Selby has spent time in various industries from automotive to banking, working for Comau, RWE nPower and Lloyds Bank, gaining a range of experience in their operational environments. Selby has been acknowledged for his accomplishments by the Royal Society of Edinburgh with an Enterprise Fellowship, winning the Henry Black and BP Prizes at Heriot-Watt.

TriMedika Ltd

Trimedika™ Ltd. is an early stage company, incorporated in Northern Ireland in Feb 2016, that manufactures non-contact thermometers for doctors and nurses in hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices that require thermometers to take human body temperature.

TriMedika is an ISO 13485 company approved for the Design, Development, Manufacture and Distribution of medical devices. We have a market ready, CE marked non-contact thermometer and can ‘fast track’ new devices to market.

The global hospital thermometer market is estimated in excess of £900 million. Trimedika™ Ltd supplies to hospitals via distributors into the NHS in UK, HSE in Ireland and in the main European markets. TriTemp™ is listed on the NHS England Supply Chain Framework for thermometers, listed on the BSO Supply Chain Framework for thermometers in Northern Ireland and the HSE in the Republic of Ireland.

Trimedika™ Ltd secured private investment from Angel investors which enabled development of the TriTemp within 18 months which is now at revenue. We have interest from distributors in over 50 countries, actively working with 10 distributors in the main European markets and have devices in over 100 hospitals around the world. Team expansion is our focus now with the recent addition of 2 new sales managers and office manager.

Further development of TriTemp will produce a ‘Connected’ version of the device to enable transfer of data directly to the hospital electronic medical records (EMR) system. TriTemp has been described as a ‘Star Trek’ thermometer as the user simply points the device at the patient’s forehead and the result is output at the touch of a button.

TriMedika was selected as one of the Top 100 Disruptor companies in the UK by Masarati and the Sunday Times in 2017.

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