Interview with our Alumni, Digital Oracles
MEET SARA SIMONE
TITLE CEO, CO-FOUNDER
INDUSTRY FINANCIAL SERVICES
COMPLETED PROGRAMME 2020
Throughout COVID19 our team has caught up with Digital Oracles to discuss their Greater Manchester Cyber Foundry experience and how completing the programme has impacted their business!
THE COMPANY
A performance monitoring and analytics platform that evaluates the operational and commercial efficacy of startups and scale-ups. The platform offers investors, accelerators and their teams much needed insights and visibility – a way to dynamically monitor portfolio progress at every point in the growth and launch lifecycle, and quickly identify the next big opportunities.
THE INNOVATION, THE IMPACT & THE BENEFITS
Understanding Digital Oracles vision, The Greater Manchester Cyber Foundry team helped to streamline their idea, clarify what they wanted to achieve, and turn their vision into a reality, resulting in a secure prototype being produced. Sara said, ‘As a start-up it is expensive and time consuming to find the right people, right methods, frameworks and algorithms. Having access to a pool of experts and academics that are going to kick the project is just fantastic and we are so happy to have had this opportunity’.
‘It put pressure on us to be realistic on our demands, so we could go live with a product ready, marketable and secure by design prototype.’
‘If we had done this in-house it would of have been a huge investment. Plus working with a university is so refreshing, as there is a very structured way of working and that is what a lot of start- up founders need; the structure and the discipline.’
The structure and mindset of the programme has also allowed Digital Oracles to implement similar processes into their business operations to clearly define and track key milestones, helping them to navigate, prioritise and evolve throughout the current COVID19 marketplace.
THE GREATER MANCHESTER CYBER FOUNDRY EXPERIENCE
Greater Manchester Cyber foundry has supported Digital Oracles on parts of their performance monitoring and analytics platform. Sara said, ‘It’s been absolutely fantastic, for me. I come from a digital and marketing background, with both myself and my co-founder coming from a corporate world with no Chief Technological Officer. We are technical but not developer level. Having the technical team, Sam, especially being our savour. It’s been such an amazing experience.’
‘For me, in phase 1, the most important workshop was the first day surrounding cyber security, exploring how can we utilise cyber security for my business – this isn’t something you normally learn from business accelerator programmes.’
THE NEXT STEPS
After completing the Greater Manchester Cyber Foundry, Digital Oracles is about to embark on their next collaboration with the same partnership in the newly launched Greater Manchester AI Foundry. Explore the Greater Manchester AI Foundry >
‘The Greater Manchester Cyber Foundry has helped us put together a secure by design prototype for our business. The AI Foundry will be an extension of what we have started, adding features to the platform. We are going to leverage a lot of data to add value for the members of the platform and community. In order to do that we need to use machine learning algorithms and predictable learning algorithms to help us create specific models and dashboards for our users.’
THE ADVICE FOR FUTURE SMES
‘Absolutely recommend the programme to those businesses that are interested in cyber security and making their product more secure by design.’ Sara also recommended the programme to, ‘Any founders that have a great idea in mind but don’t have a technical team in place and looking for that kick start it.’
Want to know more about Digital Oracles?
Visit their website here.