We have a busy couple of weeks ahead in the Data Pitch office, assessing the 142 applications we have received for our accelerator programme from enterprising startups and SMEs across Europe!  

The first call concluded on 1st October, and we are delighted to have received applications for all our challenges. Our Healthcare challenge had the most entries, closely followed by the Open Innovation challenge, with Smart Manufacturing, Tourism and ideas for Empowering Users Online also proving popular – but all twelve challenges have attracted high-quality applicants, and now begins the difficult, but rewarding job of judging the submissions and choosing the winners.

The number of completed applications for each challenge is as follows:

  • Retail – 8
  • Sports and Recreation – 6
  • Data Analytics – 5
  • Transport – 6
  • Data Management – 7
  • Health and Wellness – 29
  • Online identity – 14
  • Lifelong Learning – 4
  • Living – 4
  • Smart Manufacturing – 16
  • Tourism – 15
  • Open Innovation 28

We will be informing those selected for interview during the week beginning Monday 16th October, and interviews will take place in London between 30th October and 3rd of November.

Successful entrants will begin the programme in February 2018, receiving support and financing to develop their concepts into a sustainable business, with equity-free investment of up to €100,000 and six months’ of support and mentoring.

So many organisations are still unaware of how to unleash potential from their data.  We hope that the ideas put forward by these successful entrepreneurs via Data Pitch, with the help of funding and support from the programme, will enable businesses to re-think their attitudes to data and help them to embrace innovation and develop the best possible data-driven business models, products and services for the future.

Keep up to date with all the announcements via the news section of our website.  The next Data Pitch call opens in summer 2018.