The annual EIT Digital Challenge has come to a close and this year’s winners have been announced! The Challenge, which supports Europe’s most promising and exciting innovators and startups, will now supercharge 5 lucky startups’ plans to scale and reach international success.
On the lookout to support Europe’s most promising and exciting innovators and startups, the EIT Digital Challenge 2022 is Europe’s leading deeptech competition. The pan-European initiative aims to identify future European deeptech success stories, helping them to scale internationally and impact lasting change for generations to come.
Since 2014, the competition has attracted startups from across Europe, with many going on to become international success stories. This year, the event switched things up slightly, taking a more premium approach. Culminating with an exclusive closed-door event in Brussels in October, EIT Digital awarded 5 winners of this year’s EIT Digital Challenge scaleup contest.
Supporting Europe’s most promising deeptech startups
The Challenge, which saw applications from startups from right across Europe, invited 20 finalists to the Final event in Europe’s capital, Brussels. These startups had the chance to take part in an exciting day of pitching, networking and a VIP investors dinner.
With an attendee lineup featuring some of the biggest names in the deeptech investment space and corporate world on the exclusive guest list, these 20 innovators were under some pressure to impress and after battling it out on the stage, 5 winners were announced.
“The twenty EIT Digital Challenge finalists were all impressive scaleups, with highly engaged teams and disruptive technologies. We are very proud to have gathered such promising companies at our final event. We believe that the five winners all have excellent chances to become dominant players in the international landscape and we look forward to welcoming them into the EIT Digital Accelerator to help them develop their full potential.”
EIT Digital’s Head of Challenges Fabrizio della Pace
The 5 winners have been awarded the opportunity to join the EIT Digital Accelerator programme to support their European expansion plans as well as to receive expert support both for fundraising and customer acquisition. In current socioeconomic times, this level of support will prove indispensable, given the expertise and extensive network that EIT Digital can provide. It’s also exciting to note the diversity these startups represent, with Southern Europe really churning out the stars this year.
Over the course of the programme, the startups will enjoy coaching for investor readiness and be introduced to top investors from a network of 1,000+ VCs from all over Europe. They will also get market readiness coaching and strategic go-to-market support, facilitating access to international prospects. This is in addition to gaining access to EIT Digital’s pan-European innovation network of 350+ partners and the international visibility that EIT Digital’s network provides.
Want to get involved next year?
Check back here for updates and announcements of the Challenge 2023!
Meet the winners!
The event is all about showcasing and supporting the most promising deeptech scaleups. The 5 winners embody this and were able to prove their readiness for international growth and success. Representing innovation from across Europe, the winners are:
Covision Quality: Founded in 2020 in Italy, Covision Quality has developed a solution to automate and scale industrial visual inspection. Its software leverages computer vision and machine learning to allow customers to increase “time to inline deployment” by 20x and to reduce pseudo scrap rates by up to 90%.
Jentis: Vienna-based Jentis has developed a powerful server-side tracking tool that helps businesses extract complete, accurate, and consistent raw data to accelerate their growth. The technology makes it easy to collect user data in a GDPR-compliant manner. With Jentis server-side tracking, it’s possible to overcome the consequence of deleted cookies and broken data collection – also from ad blockers.
Loupedeck: Helsinki-based Loupedeck is creating custom consoles designed to make the creative process faster and more intuitive. Loupedeck consoles provide maximum control, accuracy, and productivity for a wide variety of workflows, including photo and video editing, audio composition, design, content creation, and streaming.
Vottun: Based in Barcelona, Vottun is focusing on helping companies to adopt blockchain technology to improve their current business processes and create new business models. Vottun has developed a platform that provides different blockchain “ready-to-use” solutions and APIs to create value. Vottun’s ready-to-use products go from NFTs to digital credentials, payments certificates, as well as traceability of data in the supply chain or in the circular economy.
WSense: A spinoff from Sapienza University in Rome, WSense specializes in underwater monitoring and communication systems, based on patented technologies that have pioneered the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT). WSense’s technologies are at the forefront of underwater wireless networking, enabling multi-modal secure wireless communications and networking among submerged and surface sensing and robotic platforms.
Congrats to all the winners!
A special prize on the table
EIT Digital Challenge 2022 has been powered by Europe’s leading open computing initiative – the Open Edge and HPC Initiative (OEHI), an ecosystem of companies with the aim to foster the development of an open and feature-rich ecosystem for ARM and RISC-V-based technologies.
This year, a special prize sponsored by OEHI was awarded to Multiverse Computing.
Multiverse Computing: Based in the Basque Country, Multiverse Computing provides software for financial companies that want to gain an edge with quantum computing. Digital methods usually fail at efficiently tackling these problems. Quantum computing, however, provides a powerful toolbox to tackle these complex problems, such as outstanding optimization methods, software for quantum machine learning, and quantum-enhanced Monte Carlo algorithms.
Karthee Sivalingam, OEHI HPC and AI industry development consultant: “OEHI is a membership-based network, and our mission is to lay the foundation for the future computing continuum ranging from HPC to Edge by enabling innovations.”
Want to get involved next year?
Check back here for updates and announcements of the Challenge 2023!
Editor’s Note: This post has been created in collaboration and with financial support from EIT Digital. If you’re also interested in partnering with us, just reach out.
