Over the next three months, seven start-ups in the fields of “Industry 4.0 & Smart Services” will team up with mentors from established companies and EY. They will form seven ‘acceleration families’ which are strongly committed to drive digital change and help corporates overcome innovation barriers. We have asked Raphaël Gindrat, BestMile, Dr. Jürgen Sturm and Dr. Alexander Graf, ZF, and Dr. Adrian Reisch, EY, about their reasons for joining the EY start-up-challenge in Berlin.

Smart buildings are revolutionizing the way we live and work. The Canadian start-up Envio has found an innovative and smart way to make digital building management systems affordable, easy to install, and applicable for any type of commercial building. The EYSC ‘acceleration family’ around Reza Alagheband, CEO of Envio, includes the mentors Angela Kreitenweis and Carsten Stöcker from RWE’s Innovation Hub, as well as Thomas Prüver, Senior Manager at EY. In our Interview, you can read more about the objectives and expectations of the Envio acceleration team.

Ideatarmac provides demandware-based solutions and a troubleshooting automation platform for accelerating e-commerce. Over the next twelve weeks, the ‘acceleration family’ around Pratyush Saxena and Ashish Chauhan will seek to fast-track Ideatarmac’s business model by offering them qualified guidance and mentorship. Dr. Philip Götting from LIDL and Sascha Theismann, EY, will provide them with qualified b2b and b2c business knowledge in the fields of funding, networking, customer experience, and customer service. Read more in our interview.

The EY start-up-challenge teams up representatives from seven hand-picked start-ups in “Industry 4.0 & Smart Services”, as well as mentors from leading corporates and EY. Over the next three 12 weeks, participants will form ‘acceleration families’, clustered around the start-ups. Learn more in our interview with Martin Nehls, iTiZZiMO, Stefan Stoerig, MAN, and Daniel Schiffner, EY.

n-Join’s Industry 4.0 innovations turn revolutionary visions into reality. Their technology listens to all machine-to-machine communications within a factory, learns how production works in intricate detail, and shares deep insights, making manufacturing processes more efficient and less energy consuming. The EYSC ‘acceleration family’ around n-Join’s Chief Executive and Co-Founder Haim Piratinskiy aims not only to create strong partnerships between innovators and corporates, but also to provide answers to the pivotal question: “When the Internet of Things understands us, will we understand it?” Read more in our interview with Haim, as well as with Dirk Ramhorst from BASF, and Klaus Schoo from EY.

In the last two years, the start-up Opal has won many awards for their data analytics solution for groceries and food retailers. Thanks to the company’s fast, user-friendly, and secure data analysis application, retailers can improve the availability of fresh products and reduce waste through stale returns. Over the next three months, the EYSC ‘acceleration family’ including Opal’s CEO Alexander Grossmann, as well as Richard Kneis, Alnatura, and Volker Stockrahm, EY, will work on the issue of how corporates can overcome the hurdles for digitization as well as how start-ups can grow and scale their business.

Zolertia has much in store for companies that want to connect their products to the Internet of Things, IoT. We have spoken with Marc Fàbregas Bachs what he is expecting from the EY start-up-challenge 2016, dedicated to the key topic of “Industry 4.0 & Smart Services”. And we have asked Zolertia’s mentors Veaceslaw Driglov, Jannic Herrmann, Niklas Kirschnick, and Christian Borowski from Daimler, as well as Philipp Kühner and Marco Liesegang from EY about their role in this ‘acceleration family’.