Livall Europe, winning start-up in the 8th Línea Directa Foundation's Road Safety Entrepreneurs Award

• The Madrid company has developed smart helmets for use with scooters and bicycles with LED lighting to indicate a change of direction, speakers embedded into the chassis, a windproof microphone and Bluetooth. In the event of an accident, it can detect a fall and automatically sends a message to emergency contacts.
• Livall will receive a cash prize of €20,000 net, with no added fees, as well as training, mentoring and access to investment rounds.
• The second highest-valued start-up was Segurvital Roads, for the development of 'Segurvital', a structure that is attached to the bottom of crash barriers to reduce the impact and severity of accidents.

Madrid, 29 April 2022. The Madrid start-up Livall Europe has won the 8th Línea Directa Foundation's Road Safety Entrepreneurs Award.

This start-up has created smart helmets for use with bicycles and scooters with an automatic LED lighting system that includes indicators that can be controlled from the handlebars. The helmets also feature built-in speakers, a windproof microphone and Bluetooth. In the event of an accident, its worldwide SOS patent, based on gravitational and motion sensors, is able to detect a fall followed by a 90-second period of immobility, after which it automatically sends a message containing the geolocation of the injured person to the emergency contacts set up in the app.

As the winning start-up in this Línea Directa Foundation's Road Safety Entrepreneurs Award, Livall will receive a cash prize of €20,000, net of any fees or commissions, as well as access to training and mentoring. At a later stage, they will also be able to access financing rounds by Bankinter's Foundation for Innovation and IESE Business School.

The second start-up acknowledged this year was Segurvital Roads, from La Rioja, whose goal is to avoid or reduce injuries from motorcycle or bicycle accidents with 'Segurvital', a structure that is attached to the bottom of roadside crash barriers to reduce the impact and severity of accidents. It has a strip of rollers made from recycled tyres that prevents a motorist or cyclist from being thrown into the centre of the road in the event of a collision. This solution would also help to prevent possible amputations or spinal cord injuries. 

This acknowledgement will allow Segurvital Roads, along with the winning start-up, to participate in the next edition of South Summit, a top event in the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem that is being held from 8 to 10 June in Madrid, where they will be able to access key players in the ecosystem. 

Through this award, the Línea Directa Foundation aims to promote and acknowledge entrepreneurship in the area of road safety, by supporting and financing innovative ideas that help fight against accidents on our roads and improve victim care after an accident. 

The five finalist start-ups from this 8th edition of the awards, which had a total of 62 candidates, submitted their proposals using an elevator pitch format to a panel of eight prestigious professionals from the company, the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the public administration, who selected the winner based on criteria such as the project's economic viability, degree of innovation and its effectiveness for improving road safety. 

Winners from previous years  

Last year, the winner was Evix, a cervical airbag system integrated into bicycle helmets; which could be extrapolated for other types of road users. In 2020, the project selected was Trucksters, for its innovative road freight transport system based on artificial intelligence and big data that reduces delivery times up to 50%. 

Other winners were Textia Innovative Solutions (2019), a child restraint system (CRS) manufactured with the innovative 'Varstiff' technology; Closca Design (2018), for the creation of a bicycle helmet that reduced its volume by 50% in order to promote its use in the urban environment; Help Flash (2017), for its luminous device for preventing being run over by immediately signalling the vehicle in case of breakdown or accident; DriveSmart (2016), an app that performs detailed analysis and assessment of the behaviours of each driver to provide personalised advice for greater safety; and, the first year, Euraslog (2015), thanks to an innovative child restraint system for bus seats.