The Portuguese company Smartex won the Web Summit's competition for entrepreneurship and innovative business. The announcement was made on the main stage of the Web Summit in Lisbon. The Porto-based company fights against textile waste with an online software as a service (SaaS) based on Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The solution monitors the manufacturing process, and it can detect defects. The pitch competition gathered more than 70 startups, but the EIC-funded project distinguished itself from the other finalists, and it was the winner chosen by the Web Summit Jury.
The Web Summit Pitch competition is open to startups exhibiting at Web Summit that have received less than €3 million in funding to date and have not had a discernible change in business model in the last three years. This year, Hanna Hennig, Information Director of Siemens, presented the award and explained that the Web Summit's Jury took into consideration the positioning of Smartex and the value proposition from the Portuguese startup.
Smartex's mission is to reduce textile waste due to defects to 0%, automate the production process and digitize the supply chain processes across the industry. The startup has many contracts outside Portugal, with a particular focus on Turkey and European countries, and it also has offices in Porto, the Chinese city of Shenzen and the American city of San Francisco. The company received a Phase 2 Grant from the European Innovation Council (2.46M€), and the CEO Gilberto Loureiro was one of the speakers of the EIC Greenhouse Gas Programme Launching event in April 2021. During his speech, Gilberto highlighted how Smartex's solution can bring sustainability to the textile industry:
"The textile industry is very archaic but massive. It's one of the most pollutant industries, and it is very inefficient in terms of waste because of defects and other processes. With our solution, we instal several cameras inside textile machines, so we can create automated inspection and avoid these defects in production by stopping machines, alerting people and the impact is huge", explained Gilberto Loureiro, CEO of Smartex, during the session. Those wishing to (re)watch the session, can do so here.
Smartex technology has already saved 7.5 million litters of water and 67 billion tons of fabric among its customers.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.