The Central European Startup Awards (CESAwards), the region’s biggest no-pitch, no-conference startups festival, announced the most affluent startups and ecosystem supporters last night at the Grand Finale in Ljubljana, Slovenia – hosted by ABC-Accelerator.
The winners of 2016 CESAwards will have the chance to compete globally with other regions in the Global Grand Finals 2017. In 2016 the CESAwards received about 800 unique nominations across all 12 categories with particular strength in the “Best Early Stage” category, where nearly 150 companies entered the competition, which are younger than one year. With such ambition and entrepreneurial spirit coming from the region, we can clearly expect incredible things for the future of Central Europe.
Another extremely competitive category was “Best Social Impact”, with lots of exciting concepts designed to improve the living conditions of everyday people, whether through health-care, education, agriculture or more.
And here are the winners of this year’s CESAwards:
Brainly, Poland (Best Social Impact Startup & Startup of the year)
“Developing countries have been struggling with the education inequality problem for years now, our platform is empowering millions of students to solve their school problems by peer to peer learning model. At Brainly we often say that we believe that there is no single person that knows everything. But, we believe that everyone knows something.”
Invoice Exchange, Slovenia (Best FinTech Startup)
“Invoice Xchange is a web-based platform that supports and enables SMEs that supply blue-chip companies and government to sell their invoices and purchase orders on an exchange and attain immediate payment.”
GREYCORTEX, Czech Republic (Best Early Stage Startup)
“Using advanced methods of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining to help organizations make their IT operations more secure and reliable.”
sektor5, Austria (Best Coworking Space)
“”Instant office – workspace dealer!” Coworking fuels your inspiration, accelerates your productivity & empowers your network. We are more than just a co-working space – we are a community of entrepreneurs.”
Urška Sršen, Croatia (Most Influential Woman)
“Co-founder of Bellabeat, a Y Combinator backed company developing systems in prenatal an neonatal care.”
Kontakt.io, Poland (Best IoT Startup)
“Beacon Hardware. Reimagined. Your infrastructure will get smarter, more sustainable, and data driven with Kontakt.io’s next generation products. Welcome to the Industrial IoT.”
Imagga, Bulgaria (Best AI/Chatbot Solution)
“Imagga is an Image Recognition Platform-as-a-Service providing Image Tagging APIs for developers & businesses to build scalable, image intensive cloud apps.”
Awakening of Heroes, Serbia (Best Indie Game Developer)
“Awakening of Heroes is a multi-platform indie game for a mid-core gamers, a perfect balance between casual games and pretty demanding Multiplayer Online Battle Arena genre. Built by indie game development studio COFA Games”
Huge Thing, Poland (Best Acceleration/Incubation Program)
“HugeThing.vc is an intensive acceleration programme, based in Poland, the programme is dedicated to startups working on a scalable, innovative idea. During this period, we aim to provide a series of methods and resources for their development and growth.”
Andrej Kiška, Czech RP (Investor of the Year)
“Startup investor at the early-stage venture capital fund Credo Ventures. Startup blogger on Medium, guest contributor at The Next Web, Forbes, Tyinternety.cz, Czechrunch, Netokracija.com, Startitup.sk. Forbes 30 under 30”
Nostromo.io, Hungary (Best User Experience)
“We are really proud to be part of the Central European Startup Awards and be able to represent Hungary in the regional final. One of our goal was to create a truly usable and lovable product and we are really happy that our users have the experience they deserve, so being the national winner of the best UX category is truly an honor.”
Everytap, Poland (People’s choice)
“With Everytap you will discover best places in your city and save money when making orders using the app with a single tap.”