Some of the South West’s most innovative technology companies from the SETsquared Business Acceleration Centres at the Universities of Bath and Bristol presented their businesses to companies, prospective investors and grant-funders at the event, which attracted over 150 delegates.

The SETsquared Centre in Bristol announced continued success in its member companies' fund-raising, achieving over £65m of investment in the last five years.

During the evening, eight selected companies entered a 60-second ‘Elevator Pitch’ competition to promote their businesses. The winning pitch, by Luke Marsden of HybridLogic, explained how the company’s innovative, patent-pending hosting platform solves three huge problems faced by web hosting companies and users of cloud infrastructure: keeping websites fast when they get spikes in traffic; automatically recovering in less than a minute when anything breaks; and allowing users to roll back to any point in time if they make an error.

The event was sponsored by the South West Angel and Investor Network (SWAIN), Veale Wasbrough Vizards, Baker Tilly and the SW Microelectronics iNet. Eze Vidra, Google's Head of Campus, gave the keynote speech.

SETsquared Centre Director Nick Sturge said: “We operate in difficult yet exciting times. SETsquared has been grown significantly over the last 10 years and we are now seeing the real opportunities to make SETsquared work for the city-region to accelerate jobs growth and sustainable economic growth. We are working closely with the City Council and others to explore how we can best contribute to the new Enterprise Zone”.

Professor Guy Orpen, Pro Vice Chancellor of Research and Enterprise at the University of Bristol, said: “The University is very proud of the work SETsquared does to support the  development of the city’s leading innovative technology  companies. Tonight’s event really helps to showcase why our region is such a vibrant place for such companies to be formed and to grow”.