The winner of the VISION Start-up of 2020 has been chosen. The successful entrant was picked live from six candidates during an exciting digital pitch session on 11 November 2020. HD Vision Systems GmbH made the best impression with the topic of “Light field and Deep Learning-based Machine Vision” and was chosen as the winner with 39 per cent of the votes cast. “We are absolutely delighted with the award as the VISION Start-up of 2020! The VISION start-up pitch of VISION and the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) is a fantastic opportunity for us as a young company to make us and our technology better known to a wide audience of specialists.
VISION represents total success for us: in 2016 as a university project and in 2018 as a newly established start-up, we were able to acquire our first customers and forge many valuable contacts during the trade fair in Stuttgart. The VISION start-up pitch has already proved worthwhile for our company: we received the first customer inquiry less than five minutes after the end of the competition! We are truly delighted and are already looking forward to the next VISION in 2021,” says Benedikt Karolus, COO/CFO of HD Vision Systems GmbH.
“I am delighted that HD Vision Systems won, because they showed us in their presentation how to solve previous problems easily with AI and image processing” says jury member Sigrid Roegner, Head of Business Innovation & Ecosystem, IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH.
The winner can now look forward to free participation in the VISION Start-up World in 2021 and media reporting by various channels in the PR activities of the German Engineering Federation.
Together with the VDMA Machine Vision (part of the VDMA Robotics + Automation Association) and the VDMA Startup-Machine network, VISION paved the way in which young start-ups could present their company with all their innovations. 35 entries were received beforehand. A jury nominated six companies and invited them take part in the digital pitch, during which 124 viewers were online and finally selected the winner.
“There were so many exciting proposals, many of them with non-industrial applications. The selection of the six finalists out of the 35 proposals was very difficult for the jury. This shows how dynamic the industry is and how much potential vision technology has! It is particularly interesting to see how quickly the start-ups convert the technologies of the future into business ideas,” says Dr. Klaus-Henning Noffz, member of the jury and Chairman of the VDMA Machine Vision Division and Director New Business Development, BASLER AG.
“We were impressed by the large number of first-class entries and the compelling pitches of the finalists. We are looking forward to welcoming HD Vision Systems as the start-up winner at VISION 2021,” said Florian Niethammer, Team Director and responsible Project Manager for VISION at Messe Stuttgart.