Ingen.io is part of BGI's 5th Ed batch of startups. Part of the Enterprise IT & Smart Data track they are competing for the financial support of up to €500k and in-kind support evaluated in over 1 million euros, including bootcamps in Lisbon & MIT (USA), mentors program, catalyst program and much more!

1. 29/7/2014 Ingen.io among 20 startups in BGI accelerator | inventures
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startup-news [/startu p-new s] MIT-sponsored programme will support startups with up to
€500k
Ingen.io among 20 startups in BGI accelerator
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2. 29/7/2014 Ingen.io among 20 startups in BGI accelerator | inventures
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Bulgarian startup [/tag/bu lgarian-startu p] , big data [/tag/big-data] , Analytics [/tag/analy tics] , Wayra
[/tag/w ay ra] , Building Global Innovators [/tag/bu ilding-global-innov ators] , Portugal [/tag/portu gal] ,
MIT [/tag/m it]
0 [http://inv entu res.eu /ingenio-am ong-2 0-startu ps-in-bgi-accelerator#com m ents]
Petya Sabinova [/au thors/pety as] , Tue, 07 /29/2014 - 09:33
Bulgarian-born Ingen.io [http://ingen.io/] , which uses Big Data analytics to unveil context in unstructured
text, has announced that they have been selected as one of 20 startups for the Building Global Innovators
[http://m itportu gal-iei.org/] accelerator.
The Ingen.io team. Photo credit: Ingen.io

3. 29/7/2014 Ingen.io among 20 startups in BGI accelerator | inventures
http://inventures.eu/ingenio-among-20-startups-in-bgi-accelerator 3/5
The Lisbon-based program divided the startups for their fifth batch into four target verticals of five –
Medical Technologies and Health IT, Smart Cities and Industrial Technologies, Enterprise IT and Smart
Data, where Igen.io are competing, and Ocean Economy. An intensive acceleration program, which
started on July 21st, will culminate in the selection of one startup from each group for up to €500k in
investment from Caixa Capital [http://caixacapital.pt/] and over €1 million in in-kind support.
“We don’t see [the financial support] as the biggest benefit,” Ingen.io COO Martin Linkov commented, “It
will be nice of course, but I think that the recognition and the synergies we can form with MIT Portugal
[http://w w w .m itportu gal.org/] and Boston [http://w eb.m it.edu /] and from there with potential US clients
will far outweigh the monetary prize in the long run.” His company, which passed on an acceleration
opportunity in Bulgaria, is currently part of the Wayra CEE [http://w w w .w ay racee.com /] accelerator in
Prague.
T ough competition
Judges at the fifth BGI accelerator program, sponsored by MIT Portugal, had the challenging task of
selecting five startups for each of their four categories, among 130 applications from 31 countries,
including China, Nigeria, Turkey and Ukraine.
“[This] was a huge challenge, considering the high quality and record number of submissions received,
making the job of the jury ever more stringent – the jury had to conduct close to 50 interviews to make
sure that BGI was picking the fittest teams"said Prof. José Paulo Esperança, head of the centre for
Entrepreneurship at ISCTE-IUL - Audax [http://iscte-iu l.pt/en/hom e.aspx] and one of the judges.
“This year we carried out an audacious realignment of the accelerator (BGI’s) target verticals and were
expecting a drop in applications,” BGI Executive Director Gonçalo Amorim commented. “Namely we
launched a brand new track dedicated to Ocean economy, an area where we are looking at a ten year
horizon impact. We were surprised to see this year’s accelerator candidates consistent with the previous
editions.”
Although 47 teams were invited for a video interview with Amorim, Ingen.io’s team was fairly optimistic
of their success: “Numbers don’t scare us, after all, we work with Big Data,” Martin Linkov said. “It doesn’t
sound humble, but we were expecting to make it. We choose very carefully the competitions we enter and
prepare extremely well.”
A winning concept
Ingen.io offers an unorthodox automated approach to analyzing unstructured text, based on World
Knowledge Graphs and mimicking the neurological processes of the human brain. Their solution maps out
all entities (people, companies, products, etc.) in a text, whether they are explicitly stated or implied,

4. 29/7/2014 Ingen.io among 20 startups in BGI accelerator | inventures
http://inventures.eu/ingenio-among-20-startups-in-bgi-accelerator 4/5
outlining their relationship type and weight of importance within the text.
Normally, this is done through manual analysis and is a key added value in non-automated products
offered by companies in media monitoring and analysis, online publishing and contextual advertising.
Ingen.io will offer to streamline this process at a freemium model – charging service providers and
companies for access to the API and offering free unlimited web access for personal use. They aim to
have their first paying customers by September of 2014.
In the meantime, juggling competitions and two accelerators is taking its toll on the team of two. Martin
Linkov and his partner, CEO Atanas Y ouroukov, admit that it would be hard to find the balance between
the competition and their product: “Events are nice and useful as they might be, unfortunately, they are
still a form of distraction, a disturbance in the rhythm. The hardest part will definitely be focusing on the
product development and devoting time to BGI simultaneously.”
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