Five creative entrepreneurs have reached the final round of the WeWork London Creator Awards competition to pitch their innovative startups and win a share of £280k in funding.

The WeWork Creator Awards is a global competition recognising and rewarding innovative startups, entrepreneurs, performing artists, and non-profit organisations.

Since March 2017, WeWork has hosted more than 31,000 attendees and given away millions of dollars to nearly 200 winners across 13 Creator Awards Regional Semi-Final events around the globe, plus one Global Finals event in New York in January 2018.

Finalists were chosen from a pool of hundreds of applicants from across the UK & Ireland. The shortlisted five businesses will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges, including celebrity actor Ashton Kutcher, at a LIVE finale taking place on 25th October.

The selected creative entrepreneurs, within the Business Ventures categories, are:

• Rachael Corson and Jocelyn Mate, Afrocenchix Ltd – an organic, ethically produced haircare brand, to help users to get soft, manageable, beautiful kinks and curls;
• Loral Quinn and Eishel Quinn, Sustainably – a tech start-up which rounds up customers’ cashless transactions and donates their spare change to charity automatically every time they shop;
• Chloë Stewart, nibs etc. – a stall and e-commerce site which is fighting unnecessary food waste, by making delicious and nourishing breakfast snacks from juice pulp that would otherwise be thrown away;
• Lucy Hutchinson, Mous – a London-based fashion/tech brand who aspire to solve problems with truly life-enhancing products, keeping an eye on both design and accessibility;
• James Roberts, mOm Incubators Ltd – a low-cost collapsible incubator, designed to provide a regulated environment that will keep babies warm – helping to decrease the number of premature child deaths globally.

Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director for WeWork Europe + the Pacific, comments: “We are very excited to be bringing The Creator Awards to the UK again this year. The standard of entries to the competition has been fantastic, which has made it incredibly challenging for our team to select only five finalists for each category.

The Creator Awards are an amazing opportunity for aspiring business men and women to really shout about their ideas, entrepreneurship and their passion. I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s pitches and wish all the finalists the best of luck with the next stage of the competition.”

Individual Images Courtesy: WeWork and Founders. Image Design: I Am New Generation Magazine