Lumilinks Wins the 2025 Snowflake Startup Challenge

We’re thrilled to share some incredible news: Lumilinks has been named the 2025 Snowflake Startup Challenge Winner.
Competing against over a thousand startups from more than a hundred countries, our team pitched at the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco — and emerged as this year’s winner.
It’s a major milestone for us, and more importantly, it recognises the work we’re doing to make data and AI accessible, effective, and impactful for business users everywhere.
As our CEO Gary Cole put it:
“Data and applications shouldn’t be about the technical audience — it’s about the business user. Our goal is to find a business user with a problem and solve it, delivering realised business impact and measurable ROI.”
When we entered the challenge, we didn’t want to pitch a concept that only sounded good in theory. We wanted to show something real, proven, and delivering value today. For industries like utilities, logistics, and field services — often underserved or slower to adopt AI — even small improvements can have an outsized impact. But historically, access to advanced data solutions has been limited or too complex to adopt.
That’s why our philosophy is simple and grounded in business reality. We start by identifying and solving high-impact problems that move the bottom line. We design AI that is easy to adopt, integrates with existing processes, and delivers clear ROI. And we automate and scale, without ever losing sight of the business user.
A clear example of this approach is FleetSense AI, co-developed with leading utility and logistics providers in the UK. FleetSense AI tackles one of the sector’s most costly and operationally painful issues: reducing vehicle off-road time.
Unlike traditional solutions that only diagnose problems after they happen, FleetSense AI predicts part failures before they occur. By combining telematics and repair history data with machine learning models running in Snowflake, it delivers actionable predictions directly to business users. We leverage services such as Snowflake Cortex, Secure Data Sharing, Document AI, and Snowpark Container Services to make this possible.
“FleetSense AI customers see up to 30% reduction in vehicle off-road time — which is an impact in the seven figures.”
– Seb Bennett, Data Science Lead
And it’s not just fleet managers who benefit. Procurement teams, finance departments, maintenance managers, and executives all gain aligned insights from a single source of truth. It’s a practical, scalable use of AI designed with the business user in mind.
During our pitch at Snowflake Summit, the judges focused on two things: real, proven business impact and serving industries that have often been left behind by the AI revolution. We weren’t offering future promises. We could show existing customers already saving millions. And that resonated.
FleetSense AI is just the beginning. By building natively on Snowflake, we’ve been able to accelerate the development of other solutions, including Smart Insights — executive-ready BI dashboards and live reporting in Streamlit — and Smart Repair, which helps engineers and service managers book the right repairs at the right price.
We’re also preparing to launch our first self-service app on Snowflake Marketplace, focused on entity and data quality to help customers unlock even more value from their data. All these applications share the same DNA: co-developed with customers to solve real problems and deliver measurable impact.
At Lumilinks, we don’t believe AI adoption should be about hype. It should be about results you can measure. Every engagement includes a value report showing exactly what was invested, what’s projected, and what’s actually being achieved — live, up to date, and accountable to the business case.
Winning the Snowflake Startup Challenge is powerful validation of that approach. We’re honoured by the recognition, but even more excited about what comes next.
Because for us, this isn’t the finish line. It’s another step on our mission to illuminate the missing links in your data and help organisations turn AI strategy into real-world outcomes.