Post by Cosmin Bodea

Two months, three GovTech challenges (proposed by incredibly dedicated partners), and hopefully some real social impact created. That was START Labs in a nutshell. I was fortunate enough to work on the product alongside Heidi Albarazi, Anastasiia Korzhylova and our amazing advisor Mark Orester. Our product, DataNexus, ended up winning a spot to pitch at the next Road to START Summit in Munich! I’ll admit, when I heard that DataNexus had won, my first reaction was: “Ohh fu**! There’s a lot of work to be done.” But I’m not afraid of hard work. In fact, I feel reassured that DataNexus is off to a strong start. We’re not the only ones heading in the right direction. Congratulations to the other two teams: Louisa Kron, Benedikt Hahn, and Ankit Kumar for FileFlow; Ulaş Mısırlıoğlu, Chiara Marcucci, and Julia Wölfel for DiviData. Big thank you to their partner institutions as well: Stadt Landshut represented by Lisa Froschhammer and BayKommun represented by Felix Appel. In case you’re wondering, START Labs was developed by some incredibly dedicated and delightfully crazy (the good kind of crazy) people. Special thanks to Yasin Öztürk, Karolina Wick, Melanie Pospisil, and Mark Orester. Thanks as well to the entire START Munich and Public Makers for making this program a reality. Last but not least, a heartfelt thank you to Julian Heigenhauser and Jennifer Schürholz from the Landratsamt Traunstein for partnering with us and helping us develop DataNexus. I’m confident this won’t be the last LinkedIn post you see about it, so stay tuned! And finally, I’ve been told that every good pitch ends with a call to action, so here’s mine: 👉 If you work in public administration and want to talk about smart data storage, data visualization, or AI in the public sector, please reach out!