It might be worth keeping an eye on these 10 award-winning start-ups

9 Jun 2017

Image: Brian A Jackson/Shutterstock

There were 10 winners at the StartUp Europe Awards, an event organised by the EU that it describes as the “Eurovision for start-ups”.

The StartUp Europe Awards was set up for start-ups at local, regional and national level, to foster innovation and the collaboration between the different actors of the European ecosystems, through the private-public partnership to support entrepreneurs.

This was the first year of the awards that form part of the StartUp Europe Accelerator led by Finnova Innovation with 10 categories of awards made available to entrants.

The results are in and there were winners from across Europe in different sectors ranging from ICT to fintech.

The winners on the night included: Robocamp (creative), Tespack (energy), INZMO (fintech), Windcity (environmental), NeuronGuard (health), VyzVoice (ICT), CityCrop (smart cities), TempBuddy (social), Waynabox (tourism) and APSU (water).

Ekuore (health), Human Surge (social) and APATEQ (water) received the Extraordinary Awards, special prizes created to recognise the effort of those start-ups whose score was very high and who got very close to the final recognition.

Meanwhile, Macedonian start-up Audified Reality was named as the winner of the Best European Neighbour StartUp Europe Award.

Lisbon a good place to start-up

Aside from the publicity of winning such an award, all of the 10 successful start-ups will get access to mentoring, including advice on how to be successful in applying to major European funds.

There were also small amounts of funding distributed to some of the winners, including Waynabox and APSU, which each received €10,000 under a European acceleration ticket prize from industry players.

It wasn’t just about start-ups, however, as Lisbon City Council was presented with the Best Public Administration for the Startups award which recognised the best programmes or public services supporting entrepreneurs and innovation in municipality, province and region categories.

Speaking of the awards, the European Commission’s Carlos Moedas said: “I want to create the kind of environment where the entrepreneurial spirit can flourish… Entrepreneurs are the stars, we’re there to help and support them.”

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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