Top-5 from Automotive, Photonics, AgroFood, A.I. and Energy Storage industries

Hocosto (Achtmaal), Lightyear (Helmond), Morphotonics (Veldhoven), Flow.ai (Tilburg) and PeelPioneers (Son) are the first winners of the Brabant Startup Awards. The prizes were presented tonight in Tilburg under the watchful eye of Constantijn van Oranje, special envoy for StartupDelta. The Brabant Startup Awards are an initiative of Innovation Origins. BOM Brabant Ventures hosted the event for the first time.

The jury, chaired by Janneke Niessen and further consisting of Alex Kind (One of A Kind Technologies), Tarique Ariswalla (Protix), Andrea van Elsas (Aduro Biotech) and Jaap Schuddemat (Heliox), had to hoose between no less than 58 startups; those were the ones that – after the nominations by the audience – appeared to meet the conditions.

Read here the portraits of the jury members and their considerations when judging.

Because the diversity of the entries was great, the jury had no easy task. Criteria for the assessment were, besides an active presence in the Brabant ecosystem, scalability, sustainability (in product and business) and the team composition. The presence of paying customers often proved decisive in the selection. The jury was also charmed by startups that come up with solutions for the major problems of our time.

For the next five days, you will find an interview with one of the five winners on InnovationOrigins.com (in Dutch and English).