Hungarian success at the Danube Cup student startup competition

The first prize went to ‘Gellit’, a team from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Danube Cup is an international startup competition franchise founded by the Corvinus University of Budapest and BME. This year it was leased and organised by 3 German universities. 

The 4-day bootcamp and competition was held in Bavaria, in Passau and Regensburg, with two student groups from Corvinus University: 

• Aprently, the reinvented a real estate platform. The team’s aim is to fully connect international real estate markets and generate a secure and simple search experience. Innovative and smart features create added value to tenants, property owners and property managers. The team members are Kristóf Kovács-Szerján, László Lőrinc Pethő, Domonkos Patrik-Pirk, Simon Rádai. 

• Arterio: The product is a reliable, accurate and comfortable blood pressure monitor and a monitoring system that saves physicians time and effort when they want to check their patients’ blood pressure. The device is a relatively small, wearable band that smoothly monitors the patient’s blood pressure. Measurements are done regularly during the day and the results are uploaded to the monitoring system in real time, where clinicians and nurses can check the condition of the patients throughout the sleep-wake cycle. The team members are Lilla Horváth, Eszter Horváth, Szabolcs Torma, Bálint Tóth. 

The students are from various undergraduate programmes at Corvinus, and Arterio has members from other universities, too, including BME. The staff of Corvinus University’s Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation helped the teams prepare, and in Germany, participants were accompanied by Head of Department Dr. Attila Petheő and Assistant Professor and Director of the DSG Programme Dr. Loretta Huszák.  

Gellit, a team founded by BME students won the international finals of the 2023 Danube Cup Competition and received the EUR 1,000 grand prize. With Gellit’s innovation, farms can turn waste (animal manure) into quality fertiliser and soil conditioner.  

Members of the teams from BME: 

• Gellit: Márton Mészáros, Szabolcs Farkas, Nóra Mogyoróssy  
• Workredible: Marcell Kovács, Róbert Gombási, Roland Szabolcs Balogh 

Congratulations to the participants! We wish you the best in your future endeavours.

János Vecsenyi, Márton Mészáros, Szabolcs Farkas, Pál Danyi 

The Danube Cup competition series was launched 7 years ago by János Vecsenyi, Honorary University Professor at the Department of Management and Business Economics at BME’s Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences and by Pál Danyi, Associate Professor at the department, for student entrepreneurs at BME and Corvinus. After its launch in 2016, the Danube Cup startup competition soon attracted international interest: several universities along the river Danube have since joined the competition series, which now has a conference and has become a professional network and a successful social enterprise.