Innovative Starters Award 2025: Pleevi, Virenti and Leexi are the winners!
Three Brussels-based start-ups – Pleevi, Virenti and Leexi – have won the Innovative Starters Award 2025 and will each receive €500,000 in funding from Innoviris.
Innoviris, the Brussels Institute for Research and Innovation, has announced the winners of the Innovative Starters Award (ISA) 2025. This prestigious award goes this year to Pleevi, Virenti and Leexi: three ambitious Brussels-based start-ups that stand out for their capacity for innovation, their technological maturity and their clear vision of sustainable entrepreneurship.
The Innovative Starters Award is presented each year to promising start-ups or scale-ups that contribute to the strategic innovation objectives of the Brussels-Capital Region. Each winner receives €500,000 in funding to accelerate their growth and strengthen Brussels' innovation ecosystem.
For the 2025 edition, 23 candidates – a record number of applications – submitted projects in one of the Region's six strategic innovation areas. After a thorough evaluation, a jury selected three projects with exceptional innovation potential and a strong societal impact.
The ISA 2025 winners
Virenti – Sustainable materials for circular electronics
Virenti is a Brussels-based green tech start-up developing a bio-based alternative to FR4, the fossil-based substrate used in the printed circuit boards of electronic devices. The production of conventional FR4 generates more than 8 billion kilograms of CO₂e per year and exposes Europe to a high dependence on Asian imports.
Virenti's solution is an innovative wood-based composite material designed to meet the stringent industrial requirements of printed circuit boards, such as mechanical, electrical and thermal performance traditionally associated with fossil-based materials while significantly reducing the carbon footprint. Thanks to its own manufacturing process, renewable raw materials are transformed into a sustainable and circular substrate.
With this innovation, Virenti addresses a growing demand from electronic manufacturers for more sustainable PCB materials that can be integrated into existing production lines to enable their increasingly ambitious ESG objectives.
With the support of the Innovative Starters Award, Virenti will set up a pilot production plant in Brussels to scale up, create local green jobs and strengthen European strategic autonomy in a key industrial sector.
Pleevi – Smart and flexible energy management for the mobility of tomorrow
The transport sector is still responsible for almost a quarter of CO₂ emissions in the European Union, with road transport accounting for the largest share. Electrification of mobility is essential to reduce these emissions, but at the same time puts pressure on the energy grid due to peak loads, grid congestion and rapidly growing demand for charging infrastructure.
Pleevi tackles this challenge with charging and energy optimisation as a service. By intelligently managing charging demand and linking it to local energy assets and grid capacity, Pleevi continuously balances energy supply and demand. Using advanced prediction algorithms, Pleevi increases the resilience of local networks, reduces energy costs and enables scalable, future-proof electrification of mobility. Through an innovative B2B2B model, Pleevi supports companies and grid operators in a faster and more efficient sustainable transition.
Leexi – AI at the service of human potential
Leexi uses artificial intelligence to increase productivity by fully automating meeting follow-up. Its AI assistant automatically generates transcripts, summaries, chapters and action lists in over 120 languages. Leexi integrates seamlessly with existing tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, telephony and CRM systems, with no learning curve for the user.
Security and compliance are at the heart of its approach: Leexi is ISO 27001 certified, compliant with the GDPR and the EU AI Act, and is based on a sovereign European infrastructure. With more than 10,000 corporate customers in Europe and growth entirely anchored in Brussels, Leexi is establishing itself as a leading player in ethical and high-performance AI.
With the support of Innoviris, Leexi will continue to invest in real-time multilingual transcription, sovereign AI infrastructures and contextual knowledge agents, helping to position Brussels as a European hub for artificial intelligence.
About the Innovative Starters Award
Every year in spring, Innoviris launches a new edition of the Innovative Starters Award. Ambitious start-ups and scale-ups with innovative, disruptive projects can apply for €500,000 in funding to accelerate innovation and stimulate sustainable economic growth in the Brussels-Capital Region.