The Amsterdam-based workforce excellence platform SwipeGuide is the winner of the “Digital Industry” category in the EIT Digital Challenge finals, as of November 12th, 2020. The 20 most promising deep tech scaleups in Europe competed in the finals and were selected for their vision and contributions to the European tech ecosystem. The top five companies were awarded prizes totalling €350 000, including international growth support by the EIT Digital Accelerator.
Willemijn Schneyder, CEO and co-founder of SwipeGuide, is immensely proud of her team and celebrates winning this EIT Digital Challenge award. “It means the passion and hard work have paid off. Winning this prize is a huge validation for all the effort our team has put into designing our product and bringing it to market. After a difficult year, I expect this award to open a lot of doors for our international expansion”.
Schneyder expects this collaboration with EIT Digital to fuel SwipeGuide’s growth across 200,000 factories in Europe, starting with Germany and the UK. SwipeGuide looks forward to getting strategic access to market, help with identifying the right targets, and the opportunity to kick in doors and expand business to local markets. Winning this award has also helped SwipeGuide’s decision to start actively raising funds with the support of EIT Digital.
For SwipeGuide, it’s also a chance to give back. “We hope that this partnership will allow us to start closing the gap between universities and companies, in order to influence the leaders that we believe are the future of our tech ecosystem,” Schneyder explains.
SwipeGuide is proud to stand with four other innovative winners of the EIT Digital Challenge scaleup contest 2020 including: Deepomatic (France), Icometrix (Belgium), Targomo (Germany), and Wishibam (France). The five winning companies will join the EIT Digital Accelerator, recognized in 2019 as one of the five World Top Public Business Accelerators.
The jury saw outstanding qualities in these five companies. “All finalists are fast-growing scaleups and have great potential to become European success stories,” says Chahab Nastar, Chief Innovation Officer at EIT Digital.
The competition was fierce in 2020. With 403 scaleups from 32 countries, EIT Digital set a new record with a 44% growth in applicants from 2019. The EIT Digital Challenge targets European digital technology scaleups focused on fast growth of their business in Europe and worldwide. The companies applied in one of five strategic innovation areas: Digital Tech, Digital Industry, Digital Cities, Digital Finance, and Digital Wellbeing.
The EIT Digital Challenge also celebrates inclusivity. Almost 40% of applicants, 55% of the 20 finalists, and 3 out of 5 winners feature women as founders or C-level executives. With average revenues of €1.4M, average funding of €7.6M, and average staff of more than 40, the 2020 laureates are the most mature prize winners in the history of the Challenge.