An entrepreneur, a startup and a data provider received awards at the Open Data Institute (ODI) Summit from Sir Nigel Shadbolt, the UK’s AI expert and ODI co-founder, to recognise their outstanding success during the Data Pitch programme.
The three special achievement ODI awards celebrated the companies and entrepreneurs that actively built partnerships, innovative solutions and achieved impressive business growth.
Greiner Packaging International won The Corporate Innovation Award, for demonstrating the greatest support for the growth of the data economy, through collaboration with the Data Pitch startups.
Greiner showed an unparalleled commitment to the programme, working with five different startups to help them develop a range of solutions and is now looking at potential opportunities to collaborate with them in the future.
Christian Mittermayr, Project Manager for Greiner, said:
“Our motivation in joining Data Pitch was to find new applications for our data, and a lot of startups have very good ideas. We found Data Pitch very helpful as it provided a framework and helped us find the right startups to work with and pre-validate them. The financial support from the EU also reduced the risks. Just looking at the data in new ways has helped us view our standard procedures in a different way. It was a unique opportunity to learn, and we would definitely recommend similar programmes to other companies.”
Spanish startup, Recognai won the Startup Impact Award, for their work with German Data Provider Uniserv to help improve its customer data management systems through machine-learning. A year after taking part in Data Pitch, Recognai has more than doubled its average monthly revenue and has a pipeline of opportunities to continue growing the business.
Daniel Vila Suero, CEO and Co-Founder of Recognai, said:
“Data Pitch provided an important boost for our company. We were at a very early stage of the business when we saw the challenge, although we had been developing the technology for a year, and the direct involvement of Data Pitch was very useful. We found a real application for our technology, and we are carrying on working with Uniserv, which has been testing our model with a view to using the product for some of its clients.”
The Female Entrepreneurship Award went to Meha Nelson, who was the Chief Technical Officer at Predina, for being an exemplary role model throughout the Data Pitch Programme. Meha co-founded Predina, which developed an AI-powered analytics platform to save lives, prevent injuries and reduce costs caused by road accidents. To date, their solution has shown a real-world reduction of 25% in accidents.
Meha Nelson said,
“I am very happy to win the Female Entrepreneurship Award because I do think there is a clear under-representation of women in the tech industry. Data Pitch was a great help to us. As a startup, you cannot afford to make mistakes by trial and error because you have limited resources. Data Pitch made us accountable for cash flow and activity and helped us establish a structure.”
To find out more about Data Pitch at the ODI Summit 2019 here.
Image credit © Paul Clarke used under CC by 4.0