News
Winners of Europe's Digital Top50 Awards announced
- McKinsey, Freshfields, Google, Hering Schuppener Consulting and 486 Capital joined forces with Bits&Pretzels to reward Europe’s most promising start-ups
- iLoF, Lition Energie, Ancora.ai, HelloBetter and Enapter win DT50 Awards 2020
Last night, the originators of the Digital Top50 Awards (DT50) – namely McKinsey & Company, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Google, 468 Capital and Hering Schuppener Consulting – announced this year's winner of the Digital Top50 Awards (www.dt50.org) at the Bits & Pretzels Networking Week. The awards recognise Europe’s top entrepreneurial talent and endorse the continent’s thriving tech scene. More than 300 firms applied across four categories: Best Technology, Best Consumer Business Model Innovation, Best Enterprise Business Model Innovation, and Tech for Good. This year, healthcare and green energy / renewables were the leading sectors among all applicants, underlining Europe's strength in these two tech categories.
The winners are:
- Best Technology: iLoF. Intelligent Lab on Fiber, Lda. The UK-based company is enabling a new era of personalized medicine, by using AI and photonics to build a cloud-based library of diseases biomarkers. Through machine learning it aims to drastically reduce the cost & time of drug discovery and providing screening and stratification tools with a current focus on Alzheimer. (https://ilof.tech/)
- Best Consumer Business Model Innovation: Lition Energie GmbH. Germany's Lition Energie has developed a blockchain-based peer-to-peer platform to connect energy consumers with regional producers of renewable energies. (https://lition.de)
- Best Enterprise Business Model Innovation: Ancora.ai AG. Using AI, the Swiss start-up translates and interprets healthcare information for patients. It employs NLP to help patients and physicians access information in order to bring diversity to trials and make medicine safer for everyone. (www.ancora.ai)
- Tech for Good: HelloBetter. Based in Berlin, Germany, HelloBetter offers highly engaging, yet scalable digital therapeutics for a broad portfolio of mental disorders, empowering people to maintain and improve their mental health through evidence-based, digital solutions. (www.hellobetter.de)
- Special Greentech Award was given to Enapter. The German/Italian firm manufacturers cost-effective electrolysers to decarbonize the mobility, heat, industry, and power sectors, and enable decentralized energy generation with our energy management system with the objective to make electrolysers a product, and ultimately a commodity. (www.enapter.com)
Winners will receive valuable support, guidance and mentoring from all 2020 partners of the awards. They will benefit from professional advice, structured consulting and coaching programes, as well as access to a huge network of leading industry decision-makers. The winner of the "Tech for Good" category will receive an additional cash prize of 50,000 euros.
“Congratulations to this year’s winners on their award and on having built amazing products and businesses. We are very pleased that the Digital Top 50 Awards showed again how thriving and geographically diverse Europe‘s tech community is. This year, we saw many applications in particular from start-ups dedicated to solving some of the most pressing health and environmental challenges we are currently facing. We look forward to continuing to support the European tech sector in general and this year‘s winners in particular on their journey“, said Lars Meyer, member of the jury and Global Co-Head of Tech, Media and Telecoms at Freshfields.
“We are in the fourth year of DT50's already – and I am proud to see that even amid these difficult times we again have a strong cohort of start-ups that applied and that have won. We are especially excited to see a very strong selection of tech in health care start-ups within the applicants, finalists and winners this year. Europe has the opportunity to be on the forefront of this disruption. Moreover, I am particularly excited that we have numerous female founders this year – which is a strong sign that we have a strong momentum for more diversity and female entrepreneurship in Europe. After the award, we will support each of our winners and help them to grow”, said Karel Dörner, founding member of the DT50 awards and Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.
“I am impressed by their passion and their conviction to find outstanding solutions for the most urgent questions of our time. This is exactly what strikes most at this year’s Digital Top50 Awards: the new generation of founders is highly impact driven with a particular focus on societal issues, ranging from smart e-health solutions to the field of renewable energies. At Hering Schuppener, we feel strongly connected to the ambitious mindset of entrepreneurs who combine visionary ideas with responsibility. That is why we are looking forward to accompanying the winning teams on their mission”, said Raphael Neuner, Partner at Hering Schuppener‘s Tech and Transformation practice.
“Huge congratulations to the winners of DT50. The 2020 cohort of applicants go after some of the hardest challenges in technology today, from artificial intelligence to green technology and large-scale enterprise software. It is exciting to see the European ecosystem contributing so actively to these global frontier technologies”, added Alexander Kudlich, General Partner at 468 Capital.
Notes to Editors
The full list of finalists can be found here: https://www.dt50.org/finalists-2020
The selected Top50 finalists come mainly from Central and Western Europe, spanning sectors as diverse as health and biotech, energy and environment, and CRM/enterprise. Most of the businesses focus on AI, SaaS, marketplaces and platforms; and around one-third were founded by females.
About Digital Top 50
McKinsey, Freshfields, Google, 468 Capital and Hering Schuppener Consulting have joined forces and initiated the Digital Top 50 Awards to reward and celebrate the bold and trailblazing work of tomorrow’s top entrepreneurs. Created under the patronage of Carlos Moedas, former European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, the awards are aimed at bolstering Europe’s thriving tech scene and recognizing the continent’s most promising start-ups. Accompanied by the knowledge and resources of academic and research partners such as INSEAD, Ashoka and RWTH Aachen University, the DT50 brings together a wealth of expertise to support Europe’s digital ecosystem. https://www.dt50.org