The winner of the third annual Pitch Your Startup, Aiva Technologies, was announced during the ICTSpring Gala dinner on Tuesday evening; the company was chosen out of the 18 ICT start-ups pitching during the day.

Aiva is an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) capable of composing emotional music. Aiva has been learning the art of music composition by reading through a large collection of music partitions, written by the greatest composers in order to create a mathematical model representation of what music is. This model is then used by Aiva to create completely unique music.

“We had 18 really great pitches this year from different industries and fields, which made our choice really difficult. But Aiva truly stood out as a unique and creative start-up”, explained Karoly Papp, Co-founder & CEO from Docler Holding.

Out of a total of 160 applications from 25 different countries, the jury selected 18 ICT start-ups, based on the criteria of innovation, uniqueness, creativity and growth potential. This year, the prizes were equivalent to a total amount of €100,000.

Aiva won the €50,000 first prize offered by Docler Holding. In second place, Realab, with its product Virtelio, received a 3-month acceleration programme in the US given by the European American Enterprise Council. Innohub offered a 3-month acceleration programme in Luxembourg as well as some coaching to the third winning start-up, Spryfit.

“We are impressed each year by the enthusiasm and quality of the projects. We started with 40 applications in 2015, then 90 in 2016 and finally over 160 this year. It's now time to push this contest one step further. We are looking to open up this competition to other partners”, said Marton Fulop, COO of Docler Holding.

“Pitch Your Start-Up” is a contest for start-ups that are active in the field of ICT. Each start-up got a time allocation of 3 minutes and 33 seconds to convince the jury. The pitching session was hosted by Melanie Delannoy (Docler Holding) and Claudine Bettendroffer (Luxinnovation). The jury was composed of experts from the national ecosystem: Xavier Buck (DCLGroup), Nicolas Mackel (LFF), Marton Fulop (Docler Holding), Jean Hilger (BCEE), Jean Diederich (Wavestone), Pol Goetzinger (Innohub), Jerome Grandidier (EAEC), Jean-Michel Ludwig (Luxinnovation), Keith Hopper (Docler Holding) and Karoly Papp (Docler Holding).

Registrations are already open for 2018 - see www.pysu.eu