Personae by a|cube wins the 2026 EU|BIC Excellence Awards

Personae by EU|BIC a|cube was voted winner of the 2026 EU|BIC Excellence Award: The Human Factor, chosen by the audience at EBN Congress 2026 in Trentino.

This year’s award, the third edition of the EU|BIC Excellence Awards, asked EU|BICs a direct question: what does it mean to build a programme that puts people at the centre by design? The response was strong. EU|BIC community members submitted programmes that took that challenge seriously. Five programmes from five countries supporting five very different populations were on stage, pitching to the community. In the end, Personae won!

Personae is the welfare accelerator of the CDP National Network, an initiative of CDP Venture Capital SGR, jointly set up by a|cube and SocialFare.

About Personae

Welfare systems across Europe are under growing pressure. Ageing populations, new forms of vulnerability, shifting family structures, and rising demand around mental health and work-life balance are straining public provision. The welfare sector has historically been slow to attract entrepreneurial innovation, private investment has been scarce, and startups with solutions struggle to find structured support that takes both their business model and their social impact seriously.

Personae takes welfare startups seriously as businesses while holding them accountable for their social impact from day one. It is a four-month acceleration programme for early-stage startups, implemented by a multidisciplinary team of managers and senior consultants from a|cube and SocialFare, spanning startup acceleration, social innovation, and welfare systems expertise. The programme focuses on four domains: individual wellbeing, family and community care, workplace wellbeing, and economic wellbeing.

Each year, up to ten startups are selected from a competitive field. They receive up to €150,000 in initial investment in exchange for equity and four months of intensive support, with the most promising ventures eligible for up to €300,000 in follow-on investment.

Highlights

• In-person workshops held one week per month, plus individual advisory sessions with the acceleration team and external mentors, and biweekly sprint reviews
• Lean startup and agile methodologies combined with human-centred design tools, including customer discovery, user interviews, problem validation, personas, and user journey mapping
• Each startup develops a Theory of Change and tracks human-centred KPIs: increased access to care, reduced time or barriers in accessing welfare services, improved user wellbeing, increased employment, and improved financial stability
• A multi-stakeholder model bringing in philanthropic foundations, welfare experts as speakers and mentors, and investors to facilitate access to capital, alongside partnership opportunities with corporates, public institutions, and third-sector actors

The story

Across three editions, Personae received 511 applications. Two ventures illustrate what the programme has produced.

Lilac Centro DCA built an integrated virtual care hub for eating disorders, bridging clinical expertise and the patient’s home environment. Through the programme’s focus on technology-driven personalisation and scaling, Lilac expanded its digital infrastructure and connected over 1,000 patients with a network of more than 120 specialists.

Develop Players set out to transform neurorehabilitation through a gamified assessment model, developing digital games and AI-enhanced tools to make clinical testing a stress-free experience. The programme supported them in refining their AI-automated reporting and adaptive training algorithms, freeing clinicians to spend more time on human empathy while personalising cognitive enhancement for users in real time. This led to free digital screenings that give families earlier, lower-barrier entry into specialised clinical pathways.