Europe’s best digital entrepreneurs are under the spotlight tonight with the presentation of the “Europioneer awards” in Amsterdam. Alexander Ljung & Eric Wahlforss of SoundCloud are European Entrepreneurs of the Year while Jon Reynolds of SwiftKey is Young European Entrepreneur of the Year (under 30 years).

The European Commission sponsors the awards as part of Startup Europe, the Commission’s six-part plan to accelerate, connect and celebrate local entrepreneurship ecosystems in Europe, so that tech start-ups not only start in Europe, but stay in Europe.

45% of Europeans would like to be their own boss if they could. On congratulating the Europioneer winners, Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes said “SoundCloud and SwiftKey destroy the myth that all good ideas start and end in Silicon Valley. These companies have great futures in Europe, and they show us that it’s sexy and enriching to be your own boss, to create your own job.”

The Europioneer awards are a partnership between the European Commission and The Next Web. 908 nominations were received from across Europe. The winners were selected by a distinguished panel of judges from Europe’s tech and startup community.

About the winners

SoundCloud is a Berlin and London-based audio platform with around 40 million users. The goal of SoundCloud is to democratise music online – for it to be more than just a listening experience. SoundCloud enables anybody to upload, record, promote and share their music, soundbites and podcasts online– users have described SoundCloud as being like “email for music” or “YouTube for audio”. Users can have a free basic account or pay a monthly fee for premium services. It was founded in 2008 by Alexander Ljung (@alexanderljung), who was born in the UK but grew up in Sweden, and Eric Wahlforss (@ericw) who is Swedish and also a musical artist. Alexander is CEO and Eric directs product development and overall company strategy

Jon Reynolds (27) of SwiftKey (@SwiftKey) founded the company in 2008 with fellow graduate Ben Medlock. SwiftKey is an app which makes typing much easier on touchscreen devices. By understanding how words work together SwiftKey predicts the current and next word in a sentence, saving users the effort of typing each letter. In developing this next generation of predictive text software, SwiftKey has built up a team of more than 100 staff in Southwark, central London, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Beijing and Seoul.

Background

Web entrepreneurs worldwide have an enormous impact on the economy and society.  Collectively, start-up companies create three million jobs in the US during their first year of business, a level of dynamism the European Commission would like to see matched in the EU.