The jury has spoken: Meet the 2022 winners of the EIT Digital Challenge

At the end of an exciting, exclusive, closed-door event in Brussels, EIT Digital has awarded the 5 winners of the EIT Digital Challenge scaleup contest 2022.

The prizes went to Covision Quality (Italy), Vottun (Spain), Loupedeck (Finland), W-Sense (Italy), Jentis (Austria).

The award winners were selected following pitches of the 20 most promising European deep tech companies to a jury of high-profile corporates and investors, who made an in-depth assessment of the finalists' offering, based on technology and market appeal.

The 5 awarded companies will join the EIT Digital Accelerator program for their European expansion and receive expert support both for fundraising and customer acquisition.

They will get coached for investor readiness and 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.

In addition to that, the winners will gain access to EIT Digital's pan-European innovation network of 350+ partners and enjoy great international visibility by means of EIT Digital's network channels.

A special prize, sponsored by 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, was awarded to Multiverse Computing, from Spain.

"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," said Karthee Sivalingam, OEHI HPC and AI industry development consultant, at the Challenge Finals.

In his closing remarks, EIT Digital's Head of Challenges Fabrizio della Pace confirmed that "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."

Covision Quality

Covision Quality is a spinoff of Covision Lab and works with its research and institutional partners, using AI and machine learning for automating and scaling the quality control process in the manufacturing industry, the most important however still to a large extent manual part of the production process in this multi-trillion euro global industry. Covision software can increase "time to inline deployment" by 20x and 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. The company's server-side cookie will not be deleted and so it's always possible to retrieve the data.

Loupedeck

Loupedeck is a Helsinki-based creator of 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

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. The platform uses private and public blockchains. 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

WSense is a deep-tech company, born as a spinoff of Sapienza University in Rome, specialized 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.

Multiverse computing

Multiverse Computing provides software for companies from the financial industry wanting to gain an edge with quantum computing. Its fields of expertise are portfolio optimization problems, risk analysis, and market simulation. 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.