Latest Award Celebration at SXSW

Pretty Good Year

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Oh, look! It's December!

That seems like a bit of an excuse to do a roundup of what's been happening here at Axial3D in 2018.

It's been an extremely busy year for us, which is perhaps not reflected by our lack of output here on the blog, but in reality, this lack of output is just indicative of just how busy we have been. It's a common symptom in a startup/scaleup business like ours. The better things get, the busier we are, the less likely it is that we take the time to share the good news! This is something we are currently working on improving and we aim to be sharing a lot more interesting news and content with you over the next while.

It's hard to know where to start… but we shall do so by looking forward before we look back. Just a few weeks ago we found out that our pitch to present at South By Southwest (SXSW) was successful. While originally a film and music festival, SXSW has in recent years grown and established itself as a world-leading tech festival, while still maintaining its music, film and comedy festival roots. Speaking slots at this event are extremely competitive so we are very excited to be presenting our panel discussion “Tumours, Transplants & Technology: AI For Life” on March the 12th in the Health and MedTech stream.

This is an excellent speaking slot and looks like it will be a very busy week for the axial3D team as we are not presenting not just at the main conference but also at a satellite event focused on NI companies.

We are particularly excited about this session for a few reasons. Firstly, Joining us on the panel will be Dr. Tim Brown from Belfast City Hospital who will be telling the audience first hand about how he has been using the axial3D service to provide 3D printed models to aid in surgical planning

Dr. Brown and the team from Axial3D will be talking about how a world first, life-saving operation was made possible through axial3D's solution (you can read more about this here). We have another reason to be excited about SXSW… but for now, that is a secret that you’ll have to wait to hear.

Now a few highlights from the last few months…

Most recently, just a few days ago, in fact, we picked up the 'Emerging Medtech Company of the Year' award at the Irish Medtech Excellence Awards.

It's worth reiterating this one here though, the medtech industry is growing rapidly. According to the Irish Medtech association, the medical technology sector in Ireland is recognized as one of the five global emerging hubs. Ireland is the home of over 300 Medtech companies and 13 of the 15 global medical technology companies are in Ireland. The sector employs over 38,000 people in Ireland and is the second largest employer of medtech professionals in Europe. To take home this award is certainly a scoop for us!

In September, we attended the TCT awards. The TCT group is an industry body focussed on design to manufacturing innovation. Here we had been nominated for two awards, the Healthcare Application Award, and the Software award and we took away the overall healthcare award and the highly commended software award.

These were great accolades for us to win and, again, up against tough competition from across the UK.

Also in September (it was a heck of a month), Axial3D was also selected by Nvidia as one of the 10 Hottest AI Startups in Europe. The Nvidia Inception program has over 3,300 companies among its members and is designed to nurture dedicated and exceptional startups that are revolutionizing industries with advances in AI and data science.

This was a particularly impressive event, with the top talent in AI from across Europe and our pitch was delivered to an audience of around 1,000 people. To have made it into this illustrious list of the top 10 in Europe was a huge boost for the whole team.

Another particularly proud moment was when the team picked up two awards at the Women in Business event in Belfast. Katie picked up the “Outstanding Innovation” award while Cathy took home the “Best Customer Service” award. As a company, we pride ourselves in these two areas and are extremely proud that this has been recognized.

Finally, in November we were nominated for the AI Ireland Award for Best Use of AI in Sector. The AI Awards is part of AI Ireland, a Not for Profit Business which runs a number a number of community websites and monthly meetups supporting the area of Data Science, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence in Ireland. We were one of the 20 Irish companies at the forefront of the development of AI in Ireland who were shortlisted for the range of awards and while we didn't take home the award, due to the tough competition and the national level coverage of this award we were particularly proud to be nominated for this one. And congrats to Nuritas who took home the award! In fairness, what Nuritas are doing is pretty awesome and the fact that their investors include Marc Benioff from Salesforce, along with Bono and The Edge from U2 means it's no embarrassment to come second place to them.