Shark Shield wins Pitch Night at LESANZ

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I love a business that really believes in their product, not many people would put themselves into the path of a Great White Shark to demonstrate their product but that’s what they do at Shark Shield.

Investors must like it as well as they just won the WA Pitch Night for the Licensing Executive Society which is a 500 member strong group of investors, patent attorneys and commercialisation professionals

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3auh6xKXkw&list=UUZc9FLH-A8p2c1x6SaP3Y5A

Basically the product is scientifically proven to repel sharks and the company has been very successful in the commercial and military market where employers feel the need to look after their divers and has also seen success in the recreational dive market operating out of Australia with little to no marketing efforts into global markets.

An old Hewlett-Packard mate of mine Lindsay Lyon purchased Shark Shield from the founder about a year ago and has spent the last year developing new IP to take the company into a much larger and potentially lucrative market and is currently on the road to raise capital to get it out to the world. Prior to buying Shark Shield Lindsay was the CEO of WA based company Mobilarm which he took public a few years back.

Their new product the Surf7 is designed to fit the back of a surfboard and trails an electrode into the water which emits an electric field that disturbs the shark.

Apparently predatory sharks have small gel filled sacs knows as ‘Ampullae of Lorenzini’ on their snouts. They use these short range sensors when feeding or searching for food.

Shark Shield emits an electrical wave which creates an unpleasant sensation impacting the shark’s ‘Ampullae of Lorenzini’. When the shark comes into proximity of the electrical wave form (a few meters in diameter) it experiences non-damaging but uncontrollable muscular spasms causing it to flee the area. (you can see this in the video when the Great White mother gets close enough to chomp but then quickly darts away)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxmqWxkWmRM&list=UUZc9FLH-A8p2c1x6SaP3Y5A

As you know I love a good Australian Hardware story and I especially love one that stops you getting eaten by sharks.

I know there are a few VC who read this blog, if you want to talk to Lindsay about the Shark Shield capital raising you can contact him via Linkedin au.linkedin.com/in/llyon

Full Disclosure: I used to work with Lindsay at HP and we helped bring all the HP Networking Switches and Routers to market, he was a good guy then and I still think he is a great guy.