At the beginning of 2019 a new Big Data Research Institute was established at Sofia University. The institute is institutionalized as Centre of Excellence (CoE) by GATE (Big Data for Smart Society) project, funded from Horizon 2020 WIDESPREAD-01-2018-2019 Teaming Phase 2 under grant agreement no. 857155 and Operational Programme Science and Education for Smart Growth 2014-2020 in partnership with Chalmers University of Technology and Chalmers Industriteknik, Sweden. GATE Institute provides innovation excellence into four strategic application themes - Future Cities, Intelligent Government, Smart Industry and Digital Health. Value is created in these themes through developing research excellence mainly in topics relevant to the three technology areas – Data Insight, Data Analytics and Data Management – and on a cross cutting area – Engineering and development. GATE aims to provide excellent research and go beyond state-of-the-art in particular focus research areas: Semantic Technologies, Real-Time Data Analytics, Explainable AI, Digital Twin, Big Data engineering methodologies and Quality Assurance. The goal of GATE is to act as a globally competitive ecosystem for conducting basic and applied research and innovation in the Big Data areas with high social impact, by translating the scientific knowledge into new governmental, scientific, industrial and societal applications. Through excellence in Big Data research, innovation and education GATE will answer the recent surge in Big Data in Bulgaria and Western Balkans. GATE aims to play a strategic role in expanding the impact of network of EU Big Data CoEs. GATE ambition is to become a driver of a data marketplace and to grow into a regional AI DIH.