After 6 months of competition, the European Commission, with Deloitte, European Young Innovators Forum and HUB Institute, announced the 2014 Europioneers Award winners at last week’s 20k participant strong Web Summit in Dublin.
This year’s big winner was Hungarian entrepreneur Peter Arvai, co-founder of Prezi who took the European Web Entrepreneur of the Year Award, an award clearly well deserved. With 45 million users worldwide and the only European start-up to have been selected for the US administration’s ConnectED, Prezi is one of Europe’s biggest success stories at the moment.
Three additional winners of Europioneers Awards were also announced last week, including:
- Founder of e-learning startup Alumn-e Guillermo Garcia named Young European Web Entrepreneur of the Year
- Cofounder of IMASTE (exited in 2012 to ON24 Inc) and currently Vizzuality/CartoDB COO Miguel Arias named Growth Web Entrepreneur of the Year – Gazelle Award
- Founder and managing director of mobile payment platform paij Sylvia Klein named Female Web Entrepreneur of the Year
Since 2013, the Europioneers competition has sought to put the spotlight on Europe’s most promising Web Entrepreneurs . The objectives of the award are to identify and recognize successful European web innovation, as well as to promote the role web entrepreneurs play in European society and encourage other Europeans to move towards entrepreneurship. In order to select the winners, the organizers of Europioneers have opted for a mixed voting model where a jury made up of various big names from Europe’s growing tech ecosystem make up 70% of the votes, while 30% are cast by the general public.