Cargonexx among finalists for German Digital Award

September 29, 2017: The start-up Cargonexx is among the finalists of the “The Spark – The German Digital Award” this year that will be presented in Berlin on October 12.

The company will pitch to win “The Spark”, which is awarded by the business newspaper Handelsblatt and the consulting company McKinsey. The start-up was nominated because of its successful use of artificial intelligence to optimise truck transports.

Cargonexx was able to set itself apart from numerous applicants and is now the only logistics company among the ten finalists.

“Technologically, we are already very far advanced in the use of artificial intelligence for the transport market. We are among the pioneers in this field in Europe. Therefore, we are pleased that we received the nomination for the Spark Award. We demonstrate that the logistics industry is not lagging behind in terms of digitisation,” commented Rolf-Dieter Lafrenz, CEO and founder, Cargonexx.

Numerous companies from all over Germany have applied for this year's Artificial Intelligence competition. An experienced jury of experts, the Handelsblatt editorial team and McKinsey consultants have identified the finalists from the best submissions in a multi-stage process. These have been selected on the basis of three criteria: impact, disruptiveness and scalability.

The evening event with around 200 invited guests from business, politics and science will take place on October 12. The award is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy. The winners of the award are expecting an expert discussion with the jury members, a broad media coverage on the channels of the Handelsblatt. The first prize winner additionally will be awarded with an animated film.

Cargonexx is a digital transportation network that was founded in 2016 by Rolf-Dieter Lafrenz and Andreas Karanas. The logistics platform has been in operation since December of the same year. At the very beginning, the algorithm was trained with 750,000 real data sets. Today, the algorithm refers to a data set of two million entries. Cargonexx operates in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Poland.