The victory of the startup competition of the GovTech.Pioneers in Vienna goes to the Bulgarian startup LogSentinel. The startup protects sensitive information such as logs, documents and data using blockchain technology. The event is a small format of the well known Pioneers Festival and focuses on innovative solutions for governments and states.
Victory means that LogSentinel has now joined the group of Pioneers500 startups that will compete for the Pioneers Challenge Award in May. As part of the award, LogSentinel’s team will also travel to New York to meet the accelerator URBAN-X, a project by Urban Us and MINI / BMW for startups offering solutions for cities.
Anton Gerunov, LogSentinel’s Chief Operations Officer says, for them, this award means visibility and reach at the Pioneers Festival, which is especially important in their fundraising phase.
Winner from 80 applicants
LogSentinel and another 15 companies, selected from 80 applicants, pitched in front of 300 decision makers, public sector experts, investors and other startups. The startup qualified for the final after winning the cyber security pitching track. In the finals, LogSentinel met CivilCops in the Citizen Collaboration category, SimLab in EdTech, and Avokaado in the Open Govtech track.
The competition is supported by the Federal Computing Center BRZ and the ministries of economics and infrastructure. This gives participants the opportunity to connect with potential partners.
From e-government consultants to founders
LogSentinel was founded at the end of 2017 by Anton Gerunov and Bozhidar Bozhanov. Who led the development of the Bulgarian eGovernment system as consultants in the Bulgarian Council of Ministers. They combined their economic and technological background with a good business sense and decided to solve a problem that they faced during their work.
“Not only is it a fancy technology, but it also solves a problem whose implications authorities are very aware of,” said jury member and Urban Us partner Stonly Baptiste at the announcement of the winner. He also added, “Cybercrime is a big and growing problem for public authorities, and it is time to come up with a new solution in this area.”
LogSentinel develops IT security solutions. Sentinel Trails, which was at the center of the pitch contest, is a fraud detection and notification system. The blockchain level prevents someone from deleting logs and corrupting a system. The startup recently launched a new product a cloud based data-store that encrypts data per record.
With a seed investment of just € 100,000, LogSentinel launched a platform that monitors all the logs in a system. So far, the solution has been used by the Bulgarian eGovernment Agency, several other local registry systems, a system operated by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and a UK hospitality platform. After winning the national round of the Elevator Lab 2018, Raiffeisenbank’s Fintech Accelerator, LogSentinel is now integrating the solution into the core banking system of Raiffeisen Bulgaria.