Pumpinheart were very fortunate to have been selected for the finals of the MedTech section of the National Startup Awards before advancing to be a Silver Medalist in 2022. Our team found this to be a very well-organised competition with minimal time commitments required of the participants, and the judging panel's feedback was invaluable. Even better is that after the competition we were invited to in-person seminars around key topics, for example, addressing grant funding, venture capital and artificial intelligence. In our case the National Award sponsor was Codec, and so we were invited to its offices in Dublin to attend an event that helped us understand how AI could be of practical application within our startup. We also got to hear from Swoop Funding on the topic of investors’ landscape & mindset.