Adverty received both the audience award and grand jury award at Procter & Gamble Corporate Day in Brussels hosted by the European Innovation Council (EIC).
This week at the Deep Tech on Display Corporate Day by P&G and Partners, a limited hand-picked number of 113 companies backed by the European Innovation Council (EIC) pilot, consisting of 4,000 companies selected from 55,000 applicants during the 4 year programme, were given the opportunity to present their business cases and engage in one-on-one business meetings with representatives from some of the leading Corporates in Europe such as P&G, Cargill, DEME, ING, Ingenico, Nokia, Solvay, Umicore, AB Inbev, Colruyt Gorup, Belfius, Worldine, Port of Antwerp, Luminus, Coca-Cola Company, BPost FutureLab, AXA Group, DOW, and LG Technology Center Europe (1).
The European Innovation Council pilot supports top-class innovators, entrepreneurs, small companies and scientists with bright ideas and the ambition to scale up internationally. It brings together the parts of Horizon 2020 that provide funding, advice and networking opportunities for those at cutting edge of innovation. The EIC pilot consists of four support programmes including the SME Instrument, FastTrack to Innovation (FTI), Future and Emerging Technologies Open (FET-Open), and the Horizon Prizes.
On the first conference day Adverty received the audience award for best presentation in its respective group, followed by the second day grand jury award for overall best presentation. This double award validates the groundbreaking and unique advertising technology invented and developed by the company during the past two years, set to enter the global markets of digital advertising on Mobile, VR and AR during 2019.
“Winning both the hearts of the audience and the jurys professional favor is rare in itself, and considering the actual product being presented is centered around advertising and monetization, this is quite spectacular“, says Niklas Bakos, CEO of Adverty.
Adverty successfully applied and got accepted for phase 1 of the European Commission’s SME Instrument Horizon 2020 initiative in 2018, the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme to date with nearly 800 billion SEK of funding available over 7 years from 2014 to 2020. Horizon 2020 is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe’s global competitiveness (2).
The acceptance of Adverty into the SME Instrument phase 1 resulted in a 0,5 MSEK grant in 2018. The acceptance also opened up the possibility of a phase 2 application for a Research & Development grant of up to 25 MSEK. The decisions from EIC regarding phase 2 acceptance is scheduled to be announced during Q1 2020.
“We believe these awards will strengthen our chances of being accepted into the phase 2 of the SME Instrument programme, where a full grant would yield up to 25 MSEK. Although Adverty is already funded for its planned expansion, a phase 2 grant will enable the R&D department to expand and follow up on a majority of conceived ideas and even to pursue the occasional moonshot initiative. Ideas that might change the ad-tech landscape for years to come”, explains Bakos.
“The award is also important as it makes Adverty stand out from the other 113 participants in the eyes of the pitch target audience of P&G, Nokia, DOW, AXA etc, companies Adverty considers as excellent potential future partners”, concludes Bakos.
[1] European Innovation Council Pilot http://bit.ly/EICPG2019 [2] Horizon 2020 SME Instrument https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/sme-instrument
