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3 Dunedin-born startups take home $60,000 worth of GigStart funding
Thu, 15th Dec 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Three Dunedin-born startup projects using UFB technology have been awarded $60,000 in the final GigStart Fund allocation.

The winning projects were CoDrivr, Swiftlet and Codelingo – all taking home $20,000 each.

CoDrivr is a virtual reality driving simulation that plans to go to market next year.

Swiftlet is a cloud platform for the Internet of Things that is being created by local developers Tussock Innovation.

And, Codelingo is developing automated, project specific, code reviews and expects to be market ready by the end of 2017.

There were 23 applications for the GigStart Fundin the fourth and final rounds.

The fund is administered by Startup Dunedin, and was established by Chorus and Nokia to provide a launch pad for new-to-market Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB)-led service concepts in Dunedin.

An initial grant of $200,000 was made for theGigStart Fund, with $153,000 being allocated in the first three rounds.

Initially, there was only $53,000 available for the final round, but there were so many worthy applicants Chorus Market development manager Kim Stewart allocated another $7,000.

Throughout the duration of the fund Dunedin start-up businesses have received $207,000 in GigStart Fund funding.

Other businesses that received grants include SuchCrowd, a crowd-sourcing platform for events; Petri Dish, a shared office space for tech creative media start-ups; Jack Pivac from Blue Twist - cloud based systems for the medical sector and Adventure Media Works, an online service for the photographic community.