5 new startups get the 1st kick: 10K
23.10.2013
This time, we didn't support 4 projets, but 5 ! Relish Guitars, Urban Alps, Cushear, KeybOri and Fashwell won venture kick’s first stage. They all won CHF 10’000. – of pre-seed capital. venture kick will allow them to expand their project and compete for CHF 20'000.- next stage.
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Pirmin Giger and his longtime friend Silvan Küng founded the guitar label "Relish Guitars". Pirmin Giger studied industrial design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland in Aarau from 2008 to 2011 and Silvan Küng studied business at University of Bern.
The startup manufactures an electric guitar made of aluminum and 3d-veneer. That's the innovation. They use sensors instead of a normal 3-way-switch that was never used before like that in the guitar branch. The sound is much better: warm, vibrant, great sustain...
Urban Alps
Alejandro Ojeda Gonzalez-Posada, founder of UrbanAlps, is PhD student at ETHZ and is currently a venture challenge student.
Urban Alps brings innovation to security systems. Its first product is a high security mechanical key that is very hard to copy, cannot be manufactured by conventional means and has long duplicating times.
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Cyril Piccard, cushear co-founder, is studying mechanical engineering at EPFL. CushEar brings intelligence into earplugs. The smart earplugs include an alarm with no inconvenient cables. It is easy to program the alarm through a smartphone application and stop missing it because the earplugs are too effective.
KeybOri
Frederick Tischhauser, KeybOri co-founder, is currently studying at ETHZ. After participating to the venture challenge course last spring, he applied for venture kick. KeybOri is an ultra-portable, rigid-foldable, wireless keyboard, inspired by origami. Knowing that rigid-foldable (hard) keyboards are ergonomically superior to non-rigid (soft) keyboards, this project aims to design a hard keyboard which folds into an object as small as a smartphone and being significantly more compact than other hard keyboards on the market.
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Matthias Dantone, one of the founders of Fashwell, participated to the venture challenge course, as he is PhD student in computer vision.
Fashwell is creating a smart online shopping assistant for apparel and accessories products. The shopping assistant helps customers to find the perfect fashion product across the web using state of the art artificial intelligence, image processing and computer vision technology.