AN impressive array of ideas were pitched as Basingstoke hosted its own Dragons’ Den style event.

Fifteen ideas were pitched at the culmination of SETsquared’s three-day Entrepreneurship Programme, held at The Innovation Centre.

Alex Cowen, from Buckskin, who runs cyber security company RazorSecure, was judged to have given the best pitch to a panel of dragons comprised of entrepreneur Phil Sharpe, Richard Fisher from accountancy firm Baker Tilly, David Bream, who is SETsquared centre director at the University of Southampton and entrepreneur Rob Mocatta.

He received a bottle of champagne but will have to wait to see if any of the dragons are willing to back RazorSecure financially.

“I was pitching for seed investment for my company,” said Alex. “I’m looking for £150,000 and in return they would get a share of my comp-any and potential profits in the future.”

He is in the business of quickly detecting when companies are hacked – a common problem.

“Right now it takes an average of 205 days to figure out that you’ve been hacked,” said Alex. “That’s an incredibly long time when you think of the amount of damage that can be caused in that time. Our aim is to help detect this sooner – we hope to do this in seconds, minutes or hours.”

Others pitching for investment included Basingstoke resident Mahesh Hariharan, who pitched for £250,000 of seed funding to help hire local employees for his technology marketplace business called Xscalo, along with Robert Sharpe from Evergreen Consulting, based in Brighton Hill, who is looking to develop an app for electric car users.

They found the free course, which involved workshops and coaching sessions covering market analysis for start-ups and funding strategies as well as a business plan and investor presentation, very useful.

Alex said: “I think the course really gave me a chance to learn as a CEO what kinds of things investors would expect and how to develop my pitch. I don’t know of any other CEO type training classes – it was excellent.”

SETsquared’s innovation director Simon Bond said: “There was a real buzz in the place and the entrepreneurs worked so hard to get ready for the investor pitch.

“I was really impressed by the quality of the participants’ business propositions and am certain that many of them can be developed into investable propositions over the next 12 months.

“We're reviewing the feedback from the investors and will be asking a number of the participants to come and join SETsquared as members in Basing View and get them ready for investment.”

In December SETsquared Partnership, launched an incubation hub at The Innovation Centre, after Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council awarded a £100,000 grant to the scheme.

The hub has a target to develop 20 new high growth companies and bring £20 million of investment to Basingstoke by 2016.