An Italian success story of the blue economy: Wsense awarded at the World Economic Forum

"Most innovative startup in the world", this is how the Italian company Wsense was defined by the World Economic Forum, which operates in the blue economy and Internet Of Underwater Things ( IoUT ) sector and which, thanks to its proprietary technology, monitors numerous data from underwater environments in real time.

An entrepreneurial reality, led by women, also supported by Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center which last September awarded the startup with the Women Startup Award at the GammaDonna Award.

Recognized as an international excellence, Wsense is a deep-tech company born in 2017 as a spinoff of the La Sapienza University of Rome and led by Chiara Petrioli, IT engineer, researcher and CEO of the company. Today, about fifty people work at Wsense, between the Italian office in Rome, the Norwegian office in Bergen, and the British office in Southampton.

At the World Economic Forum the startup was awarded the Ocean Data Challenge  -  part of the session "The Earth Data Revolution" - as an innovative company for the collection and management of data for the protection of the oceanic environment.

"This year's World Economic Forum underlined how climate change represents the greatest short-term risk for humanity. Monitoring the oceans, but also closed seas such as the Mediterranean, is essential" commented Chiara Petrioli. "The oceans - recalls the manager - absorb about a third of the CO2 produced by human activities and we are faced with the drama of marine pollution, chemicals, as well as plastics and microplastics. Our systems promise to shed light on what happens in depth: the sensors that can be applied to our underwater communication systems are able to monitor the concentration of any foreign substance in the original marine environment 24 hours a day, launch alarms and allow targeted cleaning and sanitation interventions".

A successful reality that the Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center undertakes to support and tell, in the direction of contributing more and more to the diffusion of the culture of innovation. The Wsense case was the protagonist of one of the Innovation Coffee appointments, the series of meetings organized by the Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center on the theme of innovation and new technologies.