The BoostUp! Bridge Grand Final was held in mid-October as part of WMF’s World Manufacturing Week. Four corporates, each with its own corporate challenge, found their winning solutions from our startup ecosystem.

BoostUp! Bridge was the third edition of EIT Manufacturing’s BoostUp! competition series, which began in 2020.

The idea for BoostUp! Bridge was inspired when EIT Manufacturing’s Business Creation team spotted a gap between startups looking for new markets to deploy their solutions and corporate actors unable to find the technologies they needed to address their industrial challenges. BoostUp! Bridge was setup to build “bridges” between these two key stakeholders.

During this year’s BoostUp! Bridge competition, EIT Manufacturing collaborated with four corporate partners (Whirlpool EMEA, voestalpine GmbH, KUKA, and EROSKI) to offer startups the chance to solve real-world challenges using their technology solution. Each corporate challenge was designed to be scalable within the organization, but also applicable to other verticals – providing significant growth potential for the right startup solution.

Two finalists per challenge pitched at the BoostUp! Bridge Grand Final in October 2021, and four winners were ultimately chosen. A full overview of the challenges and winners is below:

• Prenomics – Winner of the EROSKI challenge: Optimizing product shelf life​ 
• GridMetrics – Winner of the Whirlpool EMEA challenge: ​Net zero operations 
• ChainTraced – Winner of the voestalpine GmbH challenge: ​Measuring & modelling CO2 emissions 
• Roboception – Winner of the KUKA challenge: ​TrustScan – Sharing reliable quality 

During 2022, the winning startups will implement their solution with the respective corporate partners. Each will receive a €50.000 cash prize to put towards their project and a package of tailored support services from the Business Creation team.