Innovative startups working on solutions for the future of industrial automation invited to compete in the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge

Press Release

• Selected startups eligible to collaborate with Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs experts and to receive up to $175,000 in financial support to help grow their businesses and access global markets

30 April 2019

Espoo, Finland - Technology startups with innovative and disruptive solutions for the emerging industrial automation era are invited to compete in this year's Nokia Open Innovation Challenge (NOIC). Winners of this global competition will be provided with up to $175,000 in financial assistance and the opportunity to collaborate with experts from Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs to help grow their businesses and unleash new levels of productivity for the industrial and public sectors.

This year's NOIC specifically seeks out startups with disruptive ideas in industrial automation categories such as multi-robot collaboration, VR/ AR driven human augmentation for industrial and enterprise use cases, digital personal assistants in enterprises, human machine / machine human communication technologies, edge computing, and artificial intelligence and related technologies.

Marcus Weldon, President of Nokia Bell Labs and Corporate CTO of Nokia, said, "We believe that in the coming fourth industrial revolution, a convergence of operations technology (OT) and information and communication technology (ICT) will catalyze the wide scale automation in all industries and infrastructure - and our physical world as a whole. This will usher in a new era of productivity for many sectors of the economy. As we roll out end-to-end 5G around the world to deliver high performance local and wide area connectivity services, we are excited to connect with innovative startups, to allow them to come and collaborate with our experts, and for us to be able to support them to help grow their businesses and shape the future of industrial automation."

The competition is organized in partnership with NGP Capital, a global venture capital firm, backed by Nokia. NGP Capital has 14 years of expertise in evaluating, investing, and accelerating promising growth-stage companies from all around the world.

Bo Ilsoe, Partner of NGP Capital, said, "We have met thousands of founders, invested in over 90 companies, and helped several all the way into IPO or M&A. In the NOIC competition we will pay attention to great founding teams, who can demonstrate their deep domain expertise and prove they have the abilities to scale their business globally."