The Patatrack project started in 2016 by a group of people with various area of expertise, such as software optimization, heterogeneous computing, track reconstruction and High Level Trigger (HLT) at the CMS experiment at CERN. The goal was to demonstrate that part of the HLT reconstruction could be efficiently offloaded on machines equipped with GPUs for parallel execution. Nowadays, Patatrack developments have been integrated into the CMS software for event reconstruction and the project focuses on the exploration of innovative software and hardware technologies to bring smart software closer to the detector read-out at CERN experiments.