Company
MagicSolver was formed by 3 Cambridge University students: Emmanuel Carraud, Oliver Lamming and Leon Palm.
Everything started in autumn 2008 when Leon and Oliver, 2 Computer Science students, came up with the idea of a Sudoku Solver that worked just by taking a photo on your mobile phone. At Enterprise Tuesdays, famous Cambridge evening conferences on entrepreneurship, they met Emmanuel, a current Cambridge MBA student, who shared their passion to build the best mobile phone applications and to bring a little magic to their customers’ lives and agreed to bring his business skills. The iSolve team was born!
Leon, Oliver and Emmanuel decided to enter the CUE (Cambridge University Entrepreneurs) 1k Competition, where would-be entrepreneurs compete to win £1,000 with the best executive summaries. They worked together and submitted their business idea, centred around Sudoku Magic as their first application.
A few weeks later, the iSolve team were delighted to find out they were amongst the winners of the 1k Competition and they can be seen here, outside Judge Business School:
At the prize-giving ceremony, they fortuitously met with Rahul Vohra and Gareth Williams, who told them a rather incredible tale about how they’d worked on a similar application during their PhDs at Cambridge in 2005, along with a third collaborator – Steve Lilly. The iSolve team agreed to work together with them, to bring their dream of a photographic Sudoku solver to fruition on a modern phone.
Immediately, they set about putting their idea into action and spent some of the prize on purchasing 2 Mac Minis to enable them to develop for the iPhone. And, emboldened by their success in the 1k Competition, they entered the 5k Competition, which required a fleshed-out business plan and a (Dragon’s Den-style) pitch to a number of prominent entrepreneurs.
With baited breath, they awaited the results and, on the 10th of June 2009, they pitched again at the Grand Finale in the Cambridge Union:
Once all the teams had pitched and, after some deliberation by the judges, they were thrilled to be announced as winners of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs 5k Software prize sponsored by Red Gate Software and presented by Neil Davidson.
Shortly after the competition, the iSolve team became the MagicSolver company under the name MagicSolver.com Ltd. and in July 2009, they launched their first application, Sudoku Magic.
