Pitch to Rich gives over £1 million worth of prizes to Starups

Pitch to Rich is a competition launched by Virgin Media Business which concluded in June 2015. The winners were revealed in London’s Second Home, following a morning of rapid pitches.

Almost one hundred days since the Virgin Media Business Pitch to Rich competition winners were crowned and won a slice of the £1m prize, Sir Richard officially kick-started their campaigns by unveiling each winner’s individually branded Virgin Train carriage that form part of the “Business is GREAT train.

Thousands of entrants submitted a video pitch and competed in a public vote. Nine finalist entrepreneurs were invited to compete across three categories in the final. The categories for the competition were: Grow, Startup and New Things.

Over 685,000 votes were cast in order to select the nine entrepreneurs to compete in the final, underlining the strength of feeling for small businesses across the United Kingdom. There are 5.2 million businesses in the UK, a figure which has doubled since the year 2000.

The winners: In the ‘Grow’ category, the winner was was Anthony Eskinazi of JustPark, while Kiryl Chykeyuk of kino-Mo received the backing of the judges in the ‘Startup’ category. In the ‘New Things’ section, Jeff Paterson of Fourex finished at the top of the category.

We spoke to Startup winner Kiryl Chykeyuk of kino-Mo, about what life after the Pitch to Rich competition.

“When entering a competition like Pitch to Rich, you get so much out of it. We received great PR during and after the competition, with over 200 partnership enquiries coming in. The prizes are good and the organisation is great.”

See Kino-Mo’s winning video pitch here:

 

We also spoke with Julius Reynolds, founder of Sendy who was a runner up in the new things category. “Literally weeks after having the idea for the app, I saw an advert (for the competition) in London and thought it would be worth entering. Not only because of the prize, but because of the visibility you would get. Having the Virgin name associated with Sendy definitely gave a boost of credibility to the whole project.”

So what do all of today’s finalists walk away with?

In the Grow category:

• JustPark receive a £250,000 marketing campaign
• Runners up Aduna and Approved Food receive a £100,000 marketing campaign

In the Startup category:

• Kino-Mo receives a £150,000 marketing campaign and mentoring from Virgin StartUp for 12 months
• Runners up Cauli-Rice and Hegarty Maths receive a £50,000 marketing campaign

In the New Things category:

• Fourex receives a £50,000 cash investment and mentoring from the Branson family’s head of investment
• Runners up Sendy and The Skunkworks Surfboard Company receive a £10,000 investment

From increased growth opportunities to mentoring, the advantages for being part of Pitch to Rich are greatly evident. Keep you eyes peeled, to be part of Pitch to Rich 2016.