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Swansea-based AI venture Dill has been named the best start-up firm in Wales.

It took the overall title at the Wales StartUp Awards 2025. Founded by Swansea University graduate and Romanian-born Alex Coldea, the expanding global business is a smart labelling platform that enables businesses to instantly create and print compliant labels without the usual manual effort.

Designed for use across multiple locations, it replaces time-consuming formatting tasks like barcodes, QR codes, ingredients, and expiry dates with automated label generation based on real-time data.

Mr Coldea, said: “Winning the 2025 Wales StartUp of the Year is a huge moment for the team and a reflection of the impact Dill is already making across the food and retail industries.

“We started this business because we were frustrated by how slow and unnecessarily complicated labelling had become, a process so many people just accepted as ‘normal’ when we knew it could be done better. What began as a small, focused solution quickly revealed a much bigger opportunity, and that meant letting go of the original idea and starting from scratch.

“That pivot was tough, but it changed everything. We rebuilt Dill from the ground up to be simple, fast, and user‑centric.

" Today, our AI‑powered platform is making labelling seamless for brands like BrewDog, Atis, Busaba, Nisa Local, The Secret Group and more, across hundreds of sites, from BP, Shell, Esso, and Jet service stations, to Saracens Stadium and Swansea Council. From food‑to‑go and traceability to stock rotation and barcodes, Dill handles it all.

“With our recent launch in the United States and growing deployments across the º£½ÇÊÓƵ, Europe, the Middle East and Africa with Brother, our hardware partner, we’re building Dill into an AI‑driven infrastructure layer that makes labelling invisible, a seamless service that operates across any site or device.