From a global platform for redistributing unsold food, through a digital twin operating in the cloud, to... personalized mouse cursors.
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Web Summit is a good opportunity for startups to promote themselves, gain valuable contacts and attract potential investors. Therefore, it is not surprising that during this year's edition in Lisbon, as many as 2608 budding businesses from over thirty different industries appeared. However, quantity does not always mean quality, as we could find out for ourselves during the three days spent at the conference.
Among the startups, we encountered both truly innovative ones, which try to tackle humanity's most serious challenges such as food waste, thanks to technology, and those that reinvent the wheel or solve a problem they created themselves. Below you will find a compilation of ideas from both of these categories.
Jakub Rusak
EatCloud, press materials
EatCloud is a Colombian foodtech startup, whose main mission is to fight global hunger and food waste using technology. The company, unlike competitors like Too Good To Go or Karma, connects all elements of the food ecosystem through one platform: supermarkets, grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, catering companies, producers and food banks. The main goal is to distribute unsold and unused products to as many places as possible where they are most needed. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, deals with the analysis and optimization of the supply chain and food flow.
At its current stage of development, EatCloud covers 1900 food distribution points from 230 cities in Latin America and Spain. Thanks to the company's activities, over 30 thousand tons of food products worth 30 million dollars have been saved, thus avoiding the emission of over 2 thousand tons of carbon dioxide. The company is also supported by global giants such as Santander Bank, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Co., and the platform itself implements seven out of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals 2030 of the United Nations.
Inspira is a Brazilian startup whose goal is to transform and democratize the legal market. The platform developed by the team uses artificial intelligence in processing massive data and thus enables lawyers and justice institutions to have better, faster and more effective cooperation in making decisions related to legal threats.
Giants such as Deloitte, Microsoft or Goldman Sachs are already using the company's solutions. During the Web Summit, the startup representatives also won the first prize in this year's edition of PITCH - a competition for the best sales presentation, in which over a hundred companies from all over the world participated.
A digital twin is, in simple terms, a virtual model of a production environment, e.g. a factory, which allows for precise planning and replication of procedures and optimization of production chains before they are implemented. This is what the Toruń startup DBR77 does, whose stand during this year's Web Summit definitely stuck in our memory. Mainly because the solution presented by the company is already fully functional (which was not so obvious during the conference) and we had the opportunity to take a walk through the digital model of the factory using a VR set.
The greatest strength of the product from DBR77 is the ability to take a close look at production processes not only from the perspective of the plant as a whole, but also of an individual worker. The solution allows for both simulating individual implementations in real time and for virtual work at a selected position and finding out in practice whether, for example, all necessary elements needed to perform tasks are within reach. The use of virtual reality for these purposes, however, changes the entire experience from tedious planning work into a pleasant experience characterized by elements of entertainment and gamification.
While all the companies mentioned above tried to solve general problems of specific industries, the Łódź startup Animalhotels responds to very individual needs of specific people. The application was created to connect pet owners with trusted caretakers. So far only in the largest cities of Poland, but, as the creators of the project assured us during the Web Summit, expansion beyond our country's borders is also planned. So if you need to leave urgently and none of your friends or relatives can take care of your dog, cat or other animal, Animalhotels may be an alternative worth considering.
Palate is one of many examples of trying to reinvent the wheel. The application was created as a social network connecting... food lovers. Through it, users can, for example, post photos of their meals, review restaurants and find friends who like the same tastes. The idea itself could have been good a dozen or so years ago, but now? It's hard for us to imagine who could abandon Instagram or TikTok in favor of Palate.
And since we're already on Instagram and TikTok, it's worth mentioning the GemsAround app, which is advertised not even as a stripped-down copy of both these platforms, but as an external tool using AI to search for the most "Instagrammable" spots in the world.
Thanks to GemsAround, you can find an aesthetic place in your city, take a picture there, and then post it on Instagram. If this is not the definition of solving a non-existent problem, we don't know what is.
The last item in our list of the most surprising startups we came across during Web Summit is the Best Cursors app. The tool allows for the personalization of the mouse cursor in the web browser. Thanks to such an overlay, you can turn the regular pointer into, for example, Hello Kitty, characters from the Dragon Ball Z series or Marvel heroes. For a moment, we felt like we were in 2003.
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