Network

The success and achievements of ekolive would not be possible without the fruitful and trusting cooperation with and support as well as support from various partners and partner companies and organisations.

The Association of Slovak Organic Fertilizer Producers (AVOH) was established in 2022 with the aim of raising awareness of the need for organic farming and creating opportunities for all Slovak producers of organic fertilizers and biological crop protection products. One of the main tasks of the association is to create partnerships with ministries and state administrations, private institutions and similar associations at home and abroad for the purpose of commercialization, presentation, popularization and exchange of experiences. ekolive has been a member of the AVOH since May 2023.

Artemis Project is a social enterprise founded on a collective of female entrepreneurs focused on disruptive change in global economic, environmental, and social development in mining. Artemis drives agile and innovative business outcomes between female entrepreneurs and mining companies seeking to transition from ESG compliance to using ESG as an imperative for genuine change, improved business performance resulting in an improved world. Darina Štyriaková, the managing director of ekolive, is part of this collective.

C-SINK is a European project to boost large-scale atmospheric CO2 removal ( CDR) and help keep temperature rise below 2°C through seven technologies. The purpose of the C-SINK project is to deliver a complete package of proposals elaborated to support a new or modified European legal/regulatory framework to bring high quality CDRs to the market. That package will contain pre-standards (in CEN format) covering the requirements and methodologies for sampling, testing and QMS (ISO9000) on which to build monitoring, reporting and verification systems.

ekolive is part of this project, contributing to Biological CO2 fixation.

The CircLean Network: European Network of Businesses and SMEs for Industrial Symbiosis is a project implemented by Technopolis Group with a consortium of partners composed of Trinomics, International Synergies Ltd. and Arctik on the behalf of the European Commission’s DG GROW. The purpose of the CircLean Network is to mobilise industries and relevant stakeholders to overcome the barriers of industrial symbiosis’ uptake in Europe, and to seize the necessary business opportunities to meet these challenges. ekolive is part of this network.

ekolive participates in various COST activities in the person of its managing director Darina Štyriaková: CA21134 – Towards zer0 Pesticide AGRIculture : European Network for sustainability (T0P-AGRI-Network) CA22138 – REMINDNET: Recovery of Mining District Network COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

ekolive is supported by EIT Food, supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EIT Food is Europe’s leading food innovation initiative, working to make the food system more sustainable, healthy and trusted. EIT Food has coached the team and supported ekolive in the validation of its BioStimulants activities and in securing the international trademarks. Since May 2023 ekolive is a proud member of the EIT Food RisingFoodStars association.

EIT RawMaterials is the largest consortium in the raw materials sector worldwide. Its vision is to develop raw materials into a major strength for Europe. EIT RawMaterials has supported ekolive from the beginning of its journey – from the business idea to the implementation of the business plan – promoted and coached.

EIT RawMaterials is supported by the EIT, a body of the European Union.

FB-Flüssigboden GmbH is a young, dynamic company that was founded in 2016 and has firmly established itself on the market as a system provider for liquid soil. FB-Flüssigboden GmbH does not produce liquid soil itself, but enables entrepreneurs, cities and municipalities to produce the highest quality liquid soil. Due to the close cooperation with ekolive in many projects, both are jointly able to clean almost all contaminated soils in one work step and to reinstall them as liquid soil.

The Horizon 2020-funded KET4CleanProduction (KET4CP) project funds game-changing, market-creating innovations that support the growth of European bioeconomy. The project has awarded two SMEs funding to solve clean production challenges and de-risk commercialisation of biobased products and processes. Bluegene Technologies (UK) and ekolive (Slovakia) were awarded to work on research projects for a cleaner, greener and more efficient production in collaboration with: the BDC (UK), RISE (Sweden) and Bay Zoltán (Hungary).

Köster GmbH is a certified waste management company with more than 30 years of experience in the field of remediation of contaminated sites and landfill construction.For the remediation of hazardous contaminated sites, the creation of landfills and preventive environmental protection measures, Köster has bundled the expertise of a highly specialized team with many years of experience in the “Environmental Technology Competence Center”. When it comes to the remediation of contaminated sites, or sustainable soil remediation, Köster relies on the expertise of ekolive.

Since 2016, MassChallenge Switzerland, part of MassChallenge’s global network of innovators, has been a leader in helping startups across Europe grow their businesses by accelerating 610 startups across multiple industries that have raised more than $985M in funding.Their flagship program is the early-stage startup accelerator, which accepts startups from any industry, and in 2023 is comprised of the agnostic program and 4 industry-specific tracks: Sustainable Food, Sustainable Industry, Climate Solutions and HealthTech. May 25, 2023, MassChallenge Switzerland has announced the 112 early-stage startups invited to join the 2023 Accelerator Program; ekolive is one of them.

On April 13, 2023, ekolive was awarded the first prize in the “ECO Startups” category as part of the ENVIRO ATLAS 2023 award. With the ATLAS prize, the VÚB Foundation wants to highlight the important efforts of those who have decided to bear the burden of saving our planet. The VÚB Foundation joins the activities of its parent VÚB banka, which is a green bank and supports the protection of the environment in Slovakia in various areas and through various available forms of business and social responsibility. The VÚB Foundation is fully dedicated to this topic and supports environmental protection in Slovakia.

In order to support founders in scaling their companies and to underline the importance of socially, ecologically and socially relevant business models, the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt initiated the accelerator program RESPOND with the support of Europe’s leading innovation and start-up center UnternehmerTUM. The RESPOND Accelerator is the first program to promote both responsible leadership and sustainable business models in line with the UN 2030 Agenda. ekolive was invited and was part of the RESPOND Accelerator Startups Cohort 2022.

The RIS-CuRE project (“Zero waste recovery of copper tailings in the ESEE region”), under the lead of Zavod za gradbenistvo Slovenije, ZAG (Slovenian National Building and Civil Engineering Institute), aims at establishing a network of Cu value chain stakeholders in the ESEE region in order to promote an innovative service for the zero waste extraction of metals (Cu, Ag, As, Au, and REE) from Cu mining wastes, generated during past mining activities. This will contribute towards increased competitiveness in the region and serve as a source of metals for EU. Within the project ekolive cleans mining residues for further utilization in construction products.

StartLife empowers founders to build and grow food & agritech startups with a sustainable impact. In 2010, StartLife was founded at Wageningen University & Research to build, support and fund start-ups that advance breakthrough technologies in food and agriculture and create sustainable impact. ekolive was invited by StartLife in February 2023 to benefit from StartLife à la Carte, a tailor-made support program for Food and AgriTech startups with a strong product-market fit who want to use the StartLife ecosystem to accelerate their business.

Victory Organics d.o.o is a Croatian Company, founded in 2018 and licensed recently in the production, distribution, and trade of Fertilizers, including the research and experimental development in biotechnology. The company traded previously under the name Victory Minerals d.o.o. and accomplished at this time different pilot projects of bioleaching Quartz Sand with the expertise of ekolive. Today, the focus of Victory Organics d.o.o is to produce with the know-how of ekolive a new generation of biostimulants with the aim accomplishing a paradigm shift in solution of plant nutrition under the direction of an ecological production process.

Visegrád for Sustainability or V4SDG was created to become the organisation that paves the way towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Central Eastern Europe. The founders realised that the region’s sustainability actors are not connected enough, especially across sectors, and are not well-integrated into the global mainstream of sustainability affairs. Established in 2018, V4SDG has grown into a non-profit organisation of over 30 young professionals working on these objectives – including ekolive’s CEO Darina Štyriaková.