ABB announces winners of Analytical Measurement Startup Challenge

The winners in this year’s ABB Analytical Measurement Startup Challenge have been announced at an awards ceremony in Ottar, Sweden where 14 finalists from five continents pitched their digital innovations in the fields of measurement and imaging to a panel of judges.

The winner in the Measure Sustainability category was Global Sustainable Enterprise System (GSES), while Unleash Live took the crown in the Re-imagine Imaging category. Each will be awarded a collaboration project with ABB Measurement worth $30,000, with the goal of fast-tracking their solution and launching them to customers through the ABB Ability Marketplace* in over 100 countries within the year. Winners will also receive mentoring support from SynerLeap (ABB’s start-ups accelerator) and Microsoft’s start-up advisors.

“We had high hopes for this year’s challenge having selected some high calibre candidates, and we weren’t disappointed.” said Jean-René Roy, Global Business Line Manager, ABB Measurement and Analytics. “We were impressed by the innovative ideas the Challenge yielded. The winning solutions offer interesting potential in improving the sustainability, productivity and performance of our customers’ operations. We look forward to working hand-in-hand with GSES and Unleashed live to bring these game changing ideas to market.”

Giovanna Dughera, Community Manager of Microsoft for Startups Switzerland, explains: “Every year, we are excited to see how the competing start-ups respond to the Challenges set by ABB. Innovation is at the heart of solving customer issues, and the fact that the ideas shared by GSES and Unleash live are highly innovative yet grounded in the real world makes them a perfect fit for the ABB portfolio of digital solutions.”

The finale came at the end of an intensive 10-day development process, which ran from 2nd-12th December, during which finalists worked with expert mentors from ABB, Microsoft Switzerland and SynerLeap to fine-tune their innovations.

The aim of this challenge was to drive the next level of insights from emission monitoring systems, providing ABB’s customers with more holistic, value-added information on their sustainability footprint.

Global Sustainable Energy Systems (GSES), the winner in this category, was founded in The Netherlands in 2019. ABB is looking forward to working with the 14-strong GSES team over the next few months to further refine and develop its innovative approach to measuring, verifying and rating the sustainability performance of products and organisations.

The second challenge was about using digital imaging to complement ABB’s analyser portfolio, providing customers with deeper insights, and improving safety, productivity and sustainability.

The winner in this category is Unleash live, which was founded in Australia in 2016 and now has 28 employees. ABB is excited by the potential for Unleash live’s video analytics innovation to drive down costs, improve productivity, accuracy and safety for its clients.