September 2015
A TYNESIDE education technology company geared at improving training and development has received financial backing from an investment syndicate led by regional venture capital firm Northstar Ventures.
The company has made an investment of £130,000 in Video Enhanced Observation Limited (VEO), which uses the latest technology to monitor and review performance and process across a wide variety of sectors. The investment has been made from the Finance for Business North East Proof of Concept Fund.
VEO has developed an iPad application with two key elements; a mobile, real time, video tagging application and a secure online database and content management system.
It was created by teacher trainers Paul Miller and Jon Haines as a spin out from Newcastle University. The app was developed to improve in-school continuous professional development (CPD) observation processes beyond the current surveillance-style and paper-based systems.
It enables users to build peer group networks around shared video-clips, in order to efficiently promote good practice and professional improvement.
The investment from Northstar Ventures will be used to develop the online portal and make it accessible to a greater variety of business sectors.
“VEO has developed an innovative product that can dramatically impact on the quality of training and performance, providing verifiable data, audit trail and sharing of best practice,” said Dr Stephen Price, Investment Manager at Northstar Ventures.
“The product has a wide variety of potential applications across many and diverse sectors including education where the founding team has particular expertise and insight.
“However, the non-education opportunities offer even more potential and management has been able to generate extremely encouraging traction. The management team has been significantly strengthened as a result of the investment with the inclusion of Paul Stonebanks from AIS Group, and the business is now well placed to exploit this innovative technology in diverse commercial sectors.”
CEO Paul Miller said, “Securing investment from Northstar Ventures has given us a fantastic opportunity to drive forward our innovative platform.
“By intuitively combining video and data, VEO transforms CPD and business processes, creating enormous value for a wide range of commercial, clinical and educational organisations.
“We’ve had worldwide interest across several sectors and we look forward to helping customers maximise their operational efficiency and quality.”
Professor Daniel Zizzo – Dean of Research and Innovation for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University added: “As the first spin-out company from Newcastle University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, we are very excited by the imaginative potential of VEO’s software in helping learning and training in schools, companies and other organisations.
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