Fostering Innovation in the Startup Community

At last year’s Mobile World Congress, I had the honor of co-announcing a new start up accelerator program along with my industry peers at Intel and Deutsche Telekom. Challenge Up! is a program created jointly by our three companies to help inventive startups from the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR) region go-to-market faster through joint projects, mentoring, high-value networking and corporate assets.

We received over 300 applications from 40 countries! After a grueling week of mentoring sessions, workshops and pitching at ‘Acceleration Week’ last month in Krakow, I’m happy to share 12 startups were selected to participate in the four month Challenge Up! acceleration program.

All participants are early stage companies with disruptive technologies in the Internet of Everything, Data & Analytics as well as Connected and Smart solutions. To see the action for yourself, check out the video below of highlights from the week. This program, geared towards bringing these startup’s ideas to reality, will take place at multiple events in Berlin, Dublin and London over the next three months.

A huge congratulation to the twelve winners! I look forward to working alongside this talented group of innovative entrepreneurs as they take their companies and ideas to the next level.