Forgis is one of the winners of the ABB Startup Challenge

(CONNECT) ABB has announced the six winners of its Startup Challenge 2026. The ABB program recognizes and supports a new generation of start-ups worldwide that are developing innovative artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to improve energy efficiency, resilience and sustainability in industry, buildings and power grids. The only company from a German-speaking country is Forgis AG, which has been based at the Innovation Campus JED in Schlieren since December 2025. Like all the other winners, Forgis will receive 30,000 dollars from ABB as cooperation funding to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) together with the Group within six months.

Forgis is working on the brain of factories, a central interface that connects machines from all manufacturers, the necessary information and their logic. The aim is to turn isolated automation into a network of intelligent organisms. Using AI that has been trained with industrial data, Forgis automates tasks that usually require specialists for programming, configuration, commissioning and diagnostics. The Forgis platform detects errors at an early stage and optimizes set-up times, availability, throughput, quality and energy efficiency. Because Forgis, according to ABB, "helps manufacturers to compete on the basis of intelligence rather than labor costs, the company supports the relocation of production sites and strengthens the resilience of the industry".

Other winners include Sesame Sustainability from Cambridge in the US state of Massachusetts. Its platform analyzes a company's systems within a few days and recommends a decarbonization plan with the most cost-effective options for electrification, microgrids, battery storage and load management.

MorphoAI from New York automates the development of circuit breakers, reducing the manual workload from months to just a few hours. Bisly from the Estonian capital Talinn has developed a building automation platform based on digital twins that simplifies the implementation of intelligent building systems by carrying out the planning and commissioning work before the actual construction phase.

The Barcelona-based company eRoots Analytics has automated the creation of digital twins for power electronics converters and reduced the workload from weeks to hours. Faraday Predictive, based in Cambridge, UK, uses sensorless, physics-based technology to monitor entire motor systems for predictive maintenance - without additional hardware, using only voltage and current signals. Patented algorithms are integrated directly into the ABB drive ecosystem at no additional cost. ce/mm