This article was written by Agustín Pino, Junior Project Associate at Gobe Studio

Platformed by the G4I World Congress, this year’s inaugural GovTech4All Awards were created to celebrate and reward projects developed between European public administrations and startups or digital SMEs that demonstrate the power of the GovTech revolution to tackle some of government’s most pressing challenges. More than a showcase for digital ideas, the awards focus on collaborations already creating public value in practice.

The awards are divided into two categories — the Innovation Award and the Impact Award — recognizing projects that have moved beyond concept into real deployment. Reviewed by a panel of senior experts from government, international institutions, and the technology ecosystem, entries were assessed for their societal relevance, delivery potential, user focus, long-term sustainability, and category-specifi c excellence. The result is a finalist group that reflects both the maturity and growing diversity of the European GovTech ecosystem.

From healthcare and water systems to child welfare and tax applications, this year’s finalists showcase the range, ambition, and practical potential of public-private innovation.

The six finalist include:

Innovation Award:

• Gold: Registro Nacional de Medicina Intensiva – AI-powered critical-care data infrastructure for Portuguese hospitals.
• Silver: Detect and Monitor Water Leakages for Public Water Infrastructures – Using satellite intelligence to detect hidden water losses in municipal infrastructure.
• Bronze: Co-Designing Helsinki Summer Streets 2023 – Generative AI to turn urban consultation into hands-on public co-design.

Impact Award:

• Gold: Le Fil – Child-centered platform designed to reduce fragmentation in child welfare services.
• Silver: No One Left Behind – AI-powered accessibility platform enabling inclusive access to essential public tax services.
• Bronze: Benefits Assessment Simulators (MesAides28) – Rules-as-code helping citizens navigate complex social benefi ts systems.

Innovation Award:

This category recognizes projects that move beyond conventional approaches to public-sector challenges. This year’s top three finalists highlight how originality, scalability, interoperability, and real-world rollout can be combined to solve some of the government’s most pressing problems.

Gold: Registro Nacional de Medicina Intensiva

AI-powered critical-care data infrastructure for Portuguese hospitals.

A Portuguese project tackling one of the most critical areas of public service: ICU care quality. Developed by Starkdata in partnership with Portuguese hospitals and clinical governance bodies, this national AI-driven intensive care data infrastructure centralizes data across hospitals to strengthen health system performance, equity, and resource planning.

Hospitals, and especially ICUs, play a vital role in society, where citizens place their trust in frontline professionals during the gravest moments of care. Yet many institutions still operate with fragmented, underused ICU data, and incompatible systems lack the real-time systems needed for critical decision-making. The result is limited national benchmarking, uneven quality of care, and insuffi cient real-time information for planning and resource allocation. This is not a peripheral digitization issue, but a core challenge for healthcare performance and fairness.

Starkdata and Portuguese clinical bodies address this by creating a shared national platform built around interoperability, integrating a national registry, automated anonymization, KPI dashboards, and predictive capabilities. With nearly 90% of Portugal’s ICU beds integrated, an estimated 25% reduction in doctors’ administrative burden, and an ambition to improve nationwide strategic planning accuracy by 30%, the project shows how digital infrastructure can directly support better patient care while strengthening national capacity in high-stakes healthcare.

Silver: Detect and Monitor Water Leakages for Public Water Infrastructures

Using satellite intelligence to detect hidden water losses in municipal infrastructure.

Water is the foundation of life, making its proper management one of the most critical responsibilities of public administrations. In a solution that feels drawn from science fiction, Kimedes AI, in collaboration with GUSAM / Aigües d’Arenys de Munt in Catalonia, Spain, developed a satellite-based AI system. Delivered through the Syracusa SaaS platform, it uses Sentinel-1 SAR imagery to detect anomalies linked to underground leaks in municipal pipe networks, helping optimize water use and strengthen resilience, efficiency, and climate-related resource management.

Water system maintenance is notoriously challenging due to the service’s essential nature and the small margin for error. Across Europe, between 20% and 35% of treated drinking water is lost before reaching end users, creating wasted resources, higher costs, and infrastructure deterioration. For smaller municipalities with limited budgets, proactive leak detection is often especially diffi cult.

The project was shaped through co-design with water managers and public works technicians using interviews, working sessions, and pilot feedback. Its strongest advantage is replicability: no local hardware is required, outputs are GIS-compatible, and the SaaS model is designed to remain affordable for smaller administrations. The result is a strong example of deeptech applied to an everyday public service challenge, helping municipalities waste less water and act sooner without heavy infrastructure costs.

Bronze: Co-Designing Helsinki Summer Streets 2023

Generative AI to turn urban consultation into hands-on public co-design.

The places we live are designed to balance usability, mobility, and the needs of many stakeholders. Yet while citizens are at the center of urban planning, they are often only consulted at the margins of the process rather than actively involved in shaping it. This is the gap Toretei / UrbanistAI and the City of Helsinki set out to address, using generative AI to bring citizens directly into the design process.

Urban planning is ultimately about how people use public space, but traditional consultation methods often leave residents as passive commenters. Technical drawings and specialist language can also make participation difficult for non-experts. When input commonly arrives after delivery, legitimacy, usability, and public trust can be harder to build.

The Helsinki Summer Streets project stands out because participation was the method itself, not an add-on. Through structured workshops, citizens and local business owners worked in small groups using UrbanistAI to generate visual proposals, vote on ideas, and engage directly with city planners. The result is a lightweight, replicable model that can be adapted by other cities, shifting
the role of citizens from consultees to co-designers and demonstrating how AI can make participation more practical and inclusive.

Impact Award:

The second category recognizes projects built around measurable public value. This year’s top three finalists demonstrate how strong execution, user focus, and effective problem-solving can strengthen public services across direct human support, national governance systems, and the state’s internal operating capacity.

Gold: Le Fil

Child-centered platform designed to reduce fragmentation in child welfare services.

Children and young people are some of society’s most vulnerable, and those within child welfare services are in an even more sensitive position. In France, where these services support 380,000+ children and young people, there is a critical gap in day-to-day support beyond existing legal and administrative case data. La Manufacture and participating French départements tackled this issue by developing a shared digital platform for child welfare that connects children, families, foster carers, and professionals around a single child-centered information space, while interoperating with existing departmental systems.

Those in child welfare services often live in complex situations where information on health, schooling, activities, documents, and lived experience can be dispersed across incompatible systems, paper records, and informal exchanges. This weakens continuity and quality of care for some of those who need the greatest support. It is not just an efficiency issue, but one of dignity, safeguarding, and consistent care.

Le Fil addresses this gap by ensuring essential information follows the child rather than being lost when placements or professionals change. It also reduces the time spent searching for records and provides young people with a personal vault for documents and memories. Developed through a process involving over 60 participants, the platform is currently being tested with approximately 600 children and offers a scalable model for France’s 101 départements.

Silver: No One Left Behind

AI-powered accessibility platform enabling inclusive access to essential public tax services.

Communication is the basis of human interaction, especially when accessing public services. In Greece, deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens, elderly populations with hearing loss, non-native speakers, and neurodivergent individuals frequently encounter communication barriers during essential administrative procedures. Evenly, together with Greece’s Independent Authority for Public Revenue (IAPR), set out to address this challenge by integrating real-time accessibility tools directly into the country’s digital tax authority services.

As the saying goes, there are two things inevitable in life: death and taxes. Tax administrations are among the most unavoidable interactions citizens have with the state, yet the inability to communicate can quickly turn a routine process into a frustrating experience. Traditional accessibility approaches, such as permanent interpreters or specialized infrastructure, are often expensive and diffi cult to scale consistently across large administrations. As the European Accessibility Act deadline approached, IAPR faced growing pressure to ensure equal access while maintaining the security standards required for sensitive financial interactions.

Through a cloud-based platform integrated into the myAADElive and Citizen Service Centre services, Evenly and IAPR combined AI-powered real-time subtitling, multilingual translation, and on-demand Greek Sign Language interpretation. Within the fi rst two months of the pilot’s launch, the service facilitated 128 successful calls with an 87.93% success rate and a citizen satisfaction score of 9.65 out of 10, demonstrating how accessible digital infrastructure can strengthen inclusion while offering a scalable model for public services across Europe.

Bronze: Benefits Assessment Simulators (MesAides28)

Rules-as-code helping citizens navigate complex social benefi ts systems.

In welfare states, one of the primary functions of government is to ensure citizens can access the support designed to help them thrive. Yet access to social benefi ts is often more complex than it should be. Eligibility rules, overlapping schemes, changing regulations, and multiple agencies can make it diffi cult for people to understand what they are entitled to or how to claim it. The OpenFisca Association partnered with the Département d’Eure-et-Loir in France to build MesAides28, a digital benefits calculator that outlines eligibility and potential benefit amounts based on users’ situations.

Social benefits are often diffi cult to navigate due to intersecting rules, the involvement of multiple agencies, and frequent process changes that citizens may not always be aware of. This creates burdens across the system, from people unable to access support they are entitled to, to social workers, helpers, and public administrations whose work is hindered by avoidable complexity.

Built on the open-source OpenFisca engine, MesAides28 translates legislation into machine-readable rules that automatically calculate eligibility and potential benefi t amounts while directing users to the right support contacts. OpenFisca-based tools are already used across France and in Barcelona, Tokyo, New Zealand, and Australia, while the MesAides28 solution for residents of a single French department records nearly 200 monthly visits to its directory. Together, this shows how digital public infrastructure can make welfare systems more accessible for citizens, professionals, and policymakers.

The inaugural GovTech4All Awards in Collaboration with G4I offer clear evidence of the caliber of projects that public-private partnerships can deliver. These six fi nalists show that GovTech is a powerful avenue for addressing real challenges with direct consequences for citizens. Their work goes far beyond digital front doors or service portals, spanning healthcare, infrastructure, child welfare and tax delivery. If GovTech is about helping governments work better, these projects show both the depth of its potential and the many ways that impact can be achieved.