Photo: Barcelona Activa

Last 18^th of February 2020 the 5^th Barcelona Activa Pre-Incubation program took place. Part of the program included the DemoDay event, where 8 start-ups with a high technological potential participated presenting their solutions, and a jury, composed from both public and private sectors, as well as start-ups and members from the investment community, evaluated these presentations. Qbeast has been selected as the company with the highest evaluation, for its growth potential, and both technological and social impact.

In the Human Brain Project, Qbeast has been enhanced in SP7 (High-Performance Analytics and Computing Platform) during phases SGA-1 and SGA-2, and specifically in WP7.2, dedicated to data federation and data-intensive computing technologies. Qbeast has been improved with the experience gained from working with the Human Brain Atlas use case.

Qbeast is a spin-off company that originated at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), which focuses on the analysis of Big Data with approximate analytics, reducing both the time and cost of obtaining knowledge in big collections of data. The spin-off wants to help other companies to explore and process huge amounts of data with approximate methods, and achieve to extract knowledge that was not economically viable to obtain using current techniques. The Qbeast framework has been partially developed in the European Projects Human Brain Project, I-BiDaaS and QUAKE, where BSC acts as a technological partner, and has helped a number of use cases to speed up their data processes (Brain Atlas use case, CaixaBank, Telefonica I+D and FIAT Research, among others).

Cesare Cugnasco, Qbeast CEO - Founder and BSC researcher, is the author of the patent that enables this new type of analysis. The founding team is completed by Pol Santamaria, former BSC researcher in Big Data, and Clemens Jesche and Mauro Canuto, with proven experience in the start-up and enterprise sectors. On the other hand, Paola Pardo and Adrià Correas have also helped as Qbeast technical crew and BSC researchers.

At the moment of receiving the prize, Cesare has declared: “It’s a great honor to have won this competition. It has been really tough, there were very important projects and I’m really happy that we have been ranked 1^st. It is very important also for us to show that the technology we are developing in Europe can be a world-class player, and that it can position Europe as a main competitor in the Big Data Analytics map.”

The prize has a 5.000€ cash mount, and a 6-month free office space available to develop the spin-off with the advice of Barcelona Activa.

Contact:

Pol Santamaria Mateu
Qbeast Co-founder and CTO

pol@qbeast.io