Pipe Predict and Vote Base win Smart Country Start-up Award

The prize is awarded to companies with solutions in the field of smart city and gov tech.

The winners of the Smart Country Start-up Awards 2022 are Pipe Predict from Bergisch Gladbach and Vote Base from Darmstadt. The prize is awarded by GetStarted, the start-up initiative of the Bitkom digital association. The prize in each case is 5,000 euros and a membership in Bitkom. The award is given for solutions for the public sector, especially in the area of Gov-Tech and Smart City.

Here, Pipe Predict offers real-time monitoring of pipe networks for the supply of water and district heating. Founded in 2020, the Darmstadt-based company aims to predict pipe bursts and thus ensure supply security. Vote Base, on the other hand, comes from Bergisch Gladbach and belongs to the Gov-Tech category. With the help of blockchain technology, the startup founded in 2021 wants to build a secure voting app.

For Daniel Breitlinger, who works as head of startups at Bitkom, the award ceremony is a symbol of the cooperation between business and administration. "Public administration and startups should work together much more frequently and more closely than they have in the past," he says. "For that to succeed, there need to be places to get to know each other, but also tender rules that startups also have to meet."