80% Of Wayra's current cohort are working with TelefÓnica on potential multi-million Pound deals

LONDON - Nov. 26, 2019 - PRLog -- : Wayra UK (https://www.wayra.uk/) - Telefónica's global innovation arm – proves to be a successful global business developer for its portfolio of companies. 80% of start-ups from the 2019 UK's cohort are currently doing trials or have signed contracts with Telefónica, generating new revenues streams for these start-ups and taking advantage of Telefónica's 346m customers around the world. Across the entire portfolio, there has been 136 trials and/or contracts which have generated $18m in revenues for Wayra UK's portfolio of start-ups.

Five start-ups from the 2019 London programme: ChargedUp (https://chargedup.green/), Ori (https://www.ori.co/), Stasher (https://stasher.com/), Guuru (https://www.guuru.com/en/), Sensing Feeling (https://sensingfeeling.io/) - will be showcasing in a Demo Day event on Thursday 28^th November at The Conduit in Mayfair. Demo Day marks the end of nine-month programme and will comprise of short pitches followed by networking.

ChargedUp is Europe's first and largest network of mobile power-bank rental stations powered by green energy. In July this year, they became part of Priority, O2's loyalty platform. With access to millions of customers across the entire country, ChargedUp now provides O2 customers with one-hour free on-the-go phone charging. Since launching, over 30,000 hours of free charging has been recorded through the platform, and they have signed a contract potentially worth 7 figures.

Wayra has also opened global business opportunities for Ori, a next-generation cloud computing, and Sensing Feeling, a computer vision company detecting real-time emotion, are both undertaking product trials with Telefónica in Spain. Guuru, an AI customer service company is currently working with O2 in Germany, where they are providing customer-to-customer live chats.

According to Wayra UK's Director, Gary Stewart "Start-ups are looking for money, either via investment or via income, and we have proved we can do both pretty well. Our 190 UK companies have raised $292m in investments but what really differentiates us is that our start-ups have also made $18m in revenue just from contracts with Telefónica".

The Health Hub

The Health Hub is a unique new partnership between Wayra UK and Novartis UK launched in 2019. Co-designed together with the NHS, it empowers and enables health-tech start-ups to accelerate innovative solutions to address today's healthcare challenges. The three start-ups from the first cohort - TestCard (https://www.testcard.com/), ExSeed (https://www.exseedhealth.com/), Virtue Health (https://www.virtue.io/) - will also have their Demo Day, together with the London's programme start-ups.