AlphaGamma Startups Overview is a monthly overview that attempts to identify promising startups that have the potential to make a difference in their industries.
Do you know or run a startup yourself we should look into? Contact us or fill in the form here.
Here are our picks for December 2016.
AlphaGamma Startups Overview:
December 2016
GoEuro – Germany
Founder: Naren Shaam
Year founded: 2012
Website: www.goeuro.com
Corporate email: service@goeuro.com
GoEuro is a multi-mode search tool that compares and combines rail, air, bus, and car for European destinations. It is designed to suggest nearby airports and train routes to connect up where they would like to go and also estimating the entire length of travel time. After pulling in diverse data sources to offer various route options, GoEuro also makes it easier to visualize which routes are better
“GoEuro today already reaches travellers from more than 120 countries, in 12 languages, and we’re making travelling in Europe easier than ever before – both inside countries and across borders. We are building the only tool you need to fully benefit from Europe’s excellent rail, bus and air travel infrastructure.”
Aoifes – Spain
Founder: Jose Gonzalez, Jose Delgado
Year founded: 2012
Website: www.aoifes.com
Corporate email: info@aoifes.com
Aoifes is a company highly specialized in research and development of wireless network technologies for high user density environments. The technology developed by Aoifes increases total network capacity beyond that of existing technologies, therefore reducing the total number of access points required for an implementation. It also offers their clients solutions for any environment where having a high network capacity and high-quality service is critical.
The Sevilla-based scaleup Aoifes has been awarded first place in the Digital Infrastructure category of the EIT Digital Challenge.
Wallapop – Spain
Founder: Agustin Gomez
Year founded: 2013
Website: www.wallapop.com
Corporate email: info@wallapop.com
Wallapop is a hyper-local mobile marketplace for buying and selling secondhand goods created in Barcelona and supported by Antai VB
Since making our list last year, the used-item trading app has attracted another 25m users and now facilitates 20,000 transactions a day, with more than 46m products for sale. Using geolocation to match local buyers and sellers, it set out to change the preconception that second-hand items are sub-par. Now it wants to normalise the purchase of these items “as something common and not a blip for occasional moments”, says co-founder and CEO Agustin Gomez
Monzo – the UK
Founders: Gary Dolman, Tom Blomfield, Paul Rippon, Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates
Year founded: 2015
Website: www.monzo.com
Corporate email: hello@monzo.com
London-based Monzo is building a bank for people who live their lives on their smartphones. For people who want to get things done in a click and who don’t see the need for branches and cheque books. Monzo aims to provide the best current account in the world and ultimately to become an intelligent hub for your entire financial life. In August of 2016 Mondo (the startup’s initial name) rebranded to Monzo.
Sedicii Innovations – Ireland
Founder: Rob Leslie
Year founded: 2013
Website: www.sedicii.com
Corporate email: contactus@sedicii.com
Sedicii has developed and patented a technology based on the Zero Knowledge Proof Protocol that eliminates the transmission, storage and exposure of private user data during authentication or identity verification, which reduces identity theft, impersonation and any fraud resulting from the identity theft.
Sedicii adheres to the “Right To Be Forgotten” regulation and enables users to continue to consume digital services without sharing or exposing their private data. In essence, it means they can reclaim and control the use of their identity.
Sedicii Innovations from Ireland has been awarded first place in the Digital Finance category of the EIT Digital Challenge.
GlueHome – Sweden
Founders: Carl Johan Grandinson, Diego Oliva
Year founded: 2014
Website: www.gluehome.com
Corporate email: info@gluehome.com
Glue is a platform and ecosystem that enables smart, controlled in-home access for people, products and services.
Glue offers a plug-and-play solution for retail, logistics and home services providers to solve last-mile delivery, which is the biggest e-commerce pain point for consumers and retailers alike. This means groceries in your fridge, your online shopping in your hallway, your new bookshelf delivered and mounted on your wall and allowing access to cleaners, plumbers and nannies while you are away.
“We’re trying to solve the last-mile delivery problem,” said Oliva. “This means you’re able to get groceries while you’re away without the hassle of needing to be there.”
Green City Solutions – Germany
Founder: Dénes Honus, Peter Sänger, Victor Splittgerber, Liang Wu
Year founded: 2014
Website: www.greencitysolutions.de
Corporate email: info@greencitysolutions.com
Green City Solutions is a biotech and IoT startup leading the way in the business of air pollution reduction. The company has developed a freestanding solution, called CityTree, which features a moss culture that naturally absorbs the pollution that occurs in urban environments.
Each unit has the effect of up to 275 traditionally planted urban trees, yet it requires less than 1 % of the space and no groundwork. The CityTrees have a reach of up to 50 m and thanks to IoT technology, solar power and water reservoirs, they only need a few hours of maintenance each year.
The Berlin-based scaleup Green City Solutions has been awarded first place in the Digital Cities category of the EIT Digital Challenge.
Baningo – Austria
Founders: Harald Meinl, Michael Niessl, Max Nedjelik
Year founded: 2015
Website: www.baningo.com
Corporate email: info@baningo.com
Vienna-based FinTech startup creates an innovative and unique customer-bank-relationship. Founded in 2015, Baningo serves its customers with a simple and consistent online access to banks and their advisors. For bank advisors, Baningo provides a completely new sales pipeline. Baningo currently focuses on the Austrian market only, but the business model could be expanded into other markets soon.
Baningo.com creates an innovative and unique customer-bank-relationship. They serve our customers with a simple and consistent online access to banks and their advisors. For bank advisors they provide a completely new sales-pipeline
Beta-i – Portugal
Founders: Sofia Pessanha, Pedro Rocha Vieira, Ricardo Marvão, André Marquet, Pedro Santos, Tiago Pinto
Year founded: 2010
Website: www.beta-i.pt
Corporate email: geral@beta-i.pt
Based in Lisbon, Beta-i is a non-profit association created in 2010, with the mission to improve entrepreneurship through 3 main acting principles: create and boost a network of entrepreneurship, accelerate startups with global ambition and facilitate their access to investment, create space, services and products focused on startups
Beta-i was considered the biggest startup & entrepreneurship promoter in Europe by the European Enterprise Promotion Awards in June 2014. Its events are the largest startup gatherings in Portugal and include Explorers Festival, Seedcamp Lisbon, Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon, Sandbox Lisbon, Startup Weekend and the first TEDx in Portugal. The company is mostly known for being the organisation behind Lisbon Challenge, one of the most international accelerators in Europe.
FoodPanda – Germany
Founders: Ralf Wenzel, Benjamin Bauer
Year founded: 2012
Website: www.foodpanda.com
Corporate email: contact@foodpanda.com
Foodpanda is a global online food delivery marketplace that enables users to place orders at local restaurants via its website or mobile application. Customers enter their postcodes on the site, browse for food from a list of restaurants, and place the order; foodpanda processes the order details sends out an SMS to customers to confirm orders and their estimated delivery time and passes the details to partner restaurants and the restaurants deliver the food to customers.
It is called foodpanda in Asia and Europe and hellofood in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. foodpanda has partnered with more than 60, 000 restaurants globally, including Pizza Hut, Subway, KFC, McDonalds, and Jollibee.
Exipple Studio – Spain
Founder: Germán León
Year founded:
Website: www.exipple.com
Corporate email: info@exipple.com
Exipple is a technology company that specialises in Human Technology Interaction, object and human behaviour recognition and gestural interaction. “Gestoos™” is the first narrow Artificial Intelligence that allows creating smart environments that understand the object and human behaviour.
Gestoos enables gestural interactions with objects and devices. It uses a machine learning mechanism which respects people’s privacy by using anonymised data. Gestoos technology has an immense potential to enhance your product, by enabling new, differentiating user experiences, no matter which industry segment you are working in.
The Barcelona-based scaleup Exipple Studio has been awarded first place in the Digital Industry category of the EIT Digital Challenge.
Sigfox – France
Founder: Christophe Fourtet
Year founded: 2009
Website: www.sigfox.com
Corporate email: info@sigfox.com
Sigfox is the world’s leading provider of connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT). The company has built a global network to connect billions of devices to the Internet while consuming as little energy as possible, as simply as possible. Sigfox’s unique approach to device-to-cloud communications addresses the three greatest barriers to global IoT adoption: cost, energy consumption, and global scalability.
Today, the network is present in 29 countries and on track to cover 60 by 2018 – covering a population of 451million people. With millions of objects connected and a rapidly growing partner ecosystem, Sigfox empowers companies to create new innovations on the IoT. The company is headquartered in Labège near Toulouse, France’s “IoT Valley”. Sigfox also has offices in Paris, Madrid, Munich, Boston, San Francisco, Dubai and Singapore.
BLITAB Technology – Austria
Founder: Kristina Tsvetanova, Slavi Slavev
Year founded: 2014
Website: www.blitab.com
Corporate email: info@blitab.com
BLITAB is the World’s first tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people. It is the next curve Braille device for Braille reading and writing that displays on the whole page Braille text at once, without any mechanical elements. It is like an e-book which instead of using a screen displays small physical bubbles.
The newly developed technology used in the BLITAB tablet provides an opportunity for an affordable, 100x better solution, disrupting a market that has no innovations in the last 40 years. It offers completely new user experience for readers via touch navigation, text-to-speech output of any text file into Braille from USB sticks, the Internet and obtaining information via NFC tags. BLITAB is not just a tablet, it is a platform for all existing and future software applications for blind readers.
The scale up Blitab Technology has been awarded first place in the Digital Wellbeing category of the EIT Digital Challenge.
Which companies do you think should make it into the next AlphaGamma Startups Overview edition? Let us know in the comment section below or via the contact form.
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