The Dutch scaleup Active Cues has won the EIT Digital Challenge 2018 in the Digital Wellbeing category. With their serious game Tovertafel, the company won a cash prize of 50,000 euros and a year of international growth support from the EIT Digital Accelerator.
The co-founders of Active Cues Mathijs Konings and Sjoerd Wennekes are very happy with the news: “This is too crazy! This is so cool. We didn’t expect it at all”, says Wennekes. “I found the Tovertafel to be the odd one out. The other finalists had more service-oriented innovations, especially in the care sector. It appealed to the jury that our main concern is to improve the quality of life of people with dementia. We are particularly on the human side, which sets us apart from the other finalists. Winning the EIT Digital Challenge is for us a confirmation that we are moving in the right direction.”
Active Cues will use the money to expand further: “The 50K money prize is all about our vision of the future. It is to create even more moments of happiness. We are already on our way to 10 million moments of happiness worldwide per day. I expect support from EIT Digital Accelerator so that we can improve our position in Europe. We want to become a market leader and expand within Europe and to the US. We are now in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and the UK. Starting somewhere is one thing, but to put Tovertafel into all those countries, we need help with that.”
Tovertafel is aimed at stimulating physical, social and mental activity for people with cognitive challenges and ‘creating moments of happiness in care.’ The EIT Digital Challenge is a European competition to discover the best deep tech innovations in Europe. ETI Digital aims to help European companies to become unique so that Europe has a leading position in the digital economy. The 25 finalists come from 11 European countries and have been selected from over 200 applications from 24 countries.
