News Entry

Start-ups from NRW honoured as ‘Digital Start-up of the Year 2024’

29.10.2024

BMWK honours digital start-ups and presents new funding programme ‘AI for SMEs’

As part of the Digital Technologies Days 2024 under the motto ‘Transformation through innovation – sustainable, sovereign, networked’, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) honoured five winning teams in the ‘Digital Start-up of the Year 2024’ competition, including two from NRW, and presented its new technology programme ‘Generative AI for SMEs’.

Every year, the ‘Digital Start-up of the Year 2024’ award honours promising digital start-ups from the BMWK’s start-up initiatives that are already established on the market and have successfully implemented their start-up ideas in a short space of time. The winners receive prize money totalling 110,000 euros to support them in the further development of their companies. This time, two young companies from NRW were also honoured: Elona Health GmbH and Logistikbude GmbH shared third place and each received 10,000 euros in prize money. In addition, thanks to the most convincing pitch video, Logistikbude GmbH won this year’s audience award (10,000 euros), which was awarded in a public online vote. First place went to Pina technologies GmbH (50,000 euros) and second place to Certivity GmbH (30,000 euros).

The new ‘Generative AI for SMEs’ funding programme was also presented. The programme focuses on the further development, adaptation and implementation of (existing) generative AI models as well as the collection, processing and provision of the necessary data sets. The application process for the funding call has now been finalised. We reported on the call in February. The selected projects are currently being approved. Thematically, the projects are increasingly focussing on industry and production, but also on the legal and construction sectors, healthcare, logistics, media and culture. The 36-month funding period is scheduled to start on 1 February 2025. The aim of the funding programme is to develop concepts for data optimisation, the fine-tuning of AI models and the trustworthiness of AI systems, particularly through German, European and open source solutions.