Four companies team up to share prime real estate at ICE 2016

All very different in their industry sector, maturity level and size – they shared an understanding that ICE could have a big upside for their business.

They have booked N2-320, a 90m2 stand in the North Hall in a prime position and will be dividing the space between them as well as having several shared meeting areas.

“It’s quite simple,” said Martin Pashley, CCO at W2 Data, “by joining together, the four of us can get a far better position and more space. If we were on our own our costs would be higher – and we’d be tucked away at the back of the hall with far lower traffic.”

Aleks Nowak, one of the founders at Blockex agreed – “As a start-up, we know the value of being visible to our customers. Yet we also have to be prudent with our capital. This way we can launch our Digital Asset Exchange Platformat ICE with all the fanfare it deserves!”

It was not all plain sailing. “We took a risk,” remarked Marketing Director of Gamevy, Helen Walton. “W2 and Gamevy booked the space – and then started looking for others to share with us. Plenty of companies we contacted treated us with outright suspicion – as if we were proposing something really dubious! Fortunately, we soon found allpay and BlockEx who instantly got why collaborating was a good idea.”

A joint design needing to be approved by four companies sounds like a recipe for trouble, but Katy Lawrie, Business Development & Product Manager at AllPay found the process straight-forward.

“We knew we wanted a stripped back and high impact design and we made the little compromises really quickly. In many ways, there’s nothing like strict budgets to force you to think creatively! Emerging into new markets is always challenging but to collaborate at a high impact event with three other innovative companies has made that goal much more achievable."

Indeed, all four companies believe that this is just the start of a more collaborative way of working between non-competing companies and even between start-ups in the same space striving to get established.