Central European Startup Awards (CESA) is part of the Global Startup Awards, aiming to unlock startups’ full potential by gathering the best ideas and minds from 63 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa. In this year’s competition LogSentinel was awarded for ‘Best AI/ Machine Learning Startup’ and ‘Best Newcomer’ for its blockchain-based security product and won the privilege to compete with other national winners from Central Europe in Bucharest on 21st November 2019.
Bozhidar Bozhanov, CEO of LogSentinel (left) | Anton Gerunov, COO of LogSentinel (right)
The 2019 CESA Awards Competition
600 startups were publicly nominated for the CESA competition and 65 were shortlisted as finalists, competing in 16 categories. LogSentinel was nominated in as many as 4 categories, competing against great local companies such as Payhawk, BioSeek JSC, Campus X, AvtoIkonom,Technology Valley, and ScyNet. In the end, LogSentinel’s efforts in information security and development of AI were recognized with 2 awards – ‘Best AI/ Machine Learning Startup’ and ‘Best Newcomer’. LogSentinel will now compete in the Regional Phase against the national winners from other European countries. On its turn, the winners from the Regional Phase get the chance to compete with the winners from other regions, and then the ultimate Global Winners are announced on a Global Grand Finale in December 2019, in Changsha China.
LogSentinel Conquers CESA Bulgaria
The ceremony, organized by the Association of Bulgarian Leaders and Entrepreneurs (ABLE), started with The Best Newcomer award. This award comes every year to a startup with up to 2 years of age that has shown the greatest development over the last year based on growth, innovation, and impact with the product/service.
Bozhidar Bozhanov, CEO of LogSentinel, gladly accepted this prize, stating that the best is yet to come. It was a great start of the night for the LogSentinel team being named the best new company in the ecosystem and rewarded for their speedy development and growth.
Bozhidar Bozhanov accepting CESA Prize
During the last year LogSentinel developed a whole new product – SentinelDB– a per-record encrypted, secure database, which guards PII and any other data-sensitive to organizations. Using a multi-layer encryption algorithm, SentinelDB makes data technically unbreachable. SentinelDB is designed in such a way that it fully conforms to the privacy and data protection requirements in the GDPR, PSD2, ISO27001, and PCI DSS. The proprietary search module allows you to search in encrypted records thus neither the cloud provider, nor the solution administrator can have access to your data in plain-text.
Such a sophisticated data encryption solution, in combination with the blockchain-protected, secure audit trail, provided by SentinelTrails, delivers full data protection and compliance with the mentioned regulations in terms of guarding data.
Kiril Petkov, Founder, and CEO of ProViotic and co-founder of the Center for Applied Studies and Innovation, announced the winner of the Best AI/ Machine Learning Startup Award. While announcing it, he didn’t miss to provide his valuable feedback about the FinTech organizations and to urge them to guard their sensitive data better, using top-notch technologies such as blockchain and AI-driven fraud detection. He gladly announced that the winner is LogSentinel and invited Anton Gerunov, COO of LogSentinel, to receive the prize.
Anton Gerunov shared in front of the CESA audience that it was impossible for LogSentinel to win the Best AI/Machine Learning Startup Award without the support of the whole Bulgarian Startup Ecosystem. He was delighted that LogSentinel got this prize just now as, in his opinion, “It was the perfect timing. It was the perfect timing to win this prize simply because in 10-year time every single startup will be developing AI and there will be no separate prize for it. AI is our future”.
Anton Gerunov, COO of LogSentinel, accepting the CESA award for best AI
Indeed, LogSentinel has been developing an AI-driven fraud detection which helps big organizations holding sensitive personal data to gain full control over their assets and reduce the risk of any data tampering.
Anton Gerunov’s speech at CESA 2019
This is not the first recognition for LogSentinel’s achievements. In the last year alone LogSentinel received First Prize at DigitalK Startup Innovation, 1st Prize at Pioneers.GovTech in Vienna and the Local Hero award at Elevator Lab, the largest corporate FinTech accelerator in Central and Eastern Europe, created by Raiffeisenbank.
Visa Innovation Program 2019 Participant | DigitalK 2019 Award | GovTech.Pioneers BIG Prize| Raiffeisen Local Hero 2018 | LogSentinel Awards & Recognitions
This summer, LogSentinel became part of the few selected start-ups for the Visa Innovation Program, currently scoping pilot projects with some of Visa’s partners.
International market leaders such as IBM, Raiffeisenbank, Veolia are trusting LogSentinel to keep their sensitive data safe. If you would like to find out how LogSentinel can improve your organization’s information security, sign up today:
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Denitsa Stefanova is a Senior IT Business Analyst with solid experience in Marketing and Data Analytics. She is involved in IT projects related to marketing and data analytics software improvements, as well as the development of effective methods for fraud and data breach prevention. Denitsa supports her IT-related experience by applying her skills into her everyday duties, including IT and quality auditing, detecting IT vulnerabilities, and GDPR-related gaps.
