AI for Hollywood, Robots for Farms: Venture Kick Winners
31.12.2018
Entrepreneurs pitching faster internet infrastructure, new drugs to treat anxiety, algorithms to edit movies and robots to harvest food in uncomfortable conditions, each won 10,000 Swiss francs at Venture Kick stage 1 this month. These innovative thinkers will use the cash to develop their business cases over the next three months, while receiving intensive, personalized business coaching.
 Agri-Collect co-founder Pierre Brémon.
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 Mirage co-founders Igor Susmelj and Heiki Riesenkampf.
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 Polariton Technologies co-founder Claudia Hoessbacher.
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 Synendos Therapeutics co-founder Andrea Chicca.
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Discover the four latest Venture Kick projects:
Agri-Collect: Robots to Harvest Mushrooms
The best conditions to grow mushrooms -- 15 degrees Celsius, 85 percent humidity and darkness -- aren't attractive working conditions for humans. Swiss mushroom farmers have difficulty finding staff and staying profitable, while competing with imports that can sell for as much as 70 percent less than Swiss prices. Mechanical engineering graduate Pierre Brémon, and microengineering students Guillaume Thivolet and Fahradin Mujovi from Switzerland’s École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, alongside engineer Gustavo Santa Maria and industrial designer Mariano Filippini, are developing robots to harvest oyster, shiitake and button mushrooms, 24 hours a day.
Mirage: Movie-SFX Editing Accelerated by Machine-Learning
Adding visual effects to movies requires manual work, working frame-by-frame. Masking objects in videos, a process called rotoscoping, can take as long as 12 hours for each minute of video material. The largest film studios currently outsource this tedious work to lower-income countries. Mirage will use machine-learning to train algorithms to perform this task ten times more quickly, allowing smaller visual effects studios around the world to save time. The team, who met at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, consists of co-founders Igor Susmelj and Heiki Riesenkampf, graduates from computer vision lab, and Mohammed Khouni, who is completing a degree in mechanical engineering.
Polariton Technologies: Faster Communication Infrastructure
Our world is filling with digital devices that need to communicate with each other, and modern lifestyles mean people want to receive more data via the internet. Modulators, which convert electrical signals into the light signals necessary to cross the world in fiber optic cables, are an essential part of our communication infrastructure. ETH Zurich researchers Claudia Hoessbacher, Wolfgang Heni and Benedikt Bäuerle have found a way to shrink these components to nanoscale, while quadrupling the speed of data transmission and reducing its energy consumption.
Synendos Therapeutics: Novel Drugs to Treat Anxiety and Stress Disorders
An estimated four percent of the world’s population suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Synendos hopes to commercialize new drugs to treat this, as well as other mood and anxiety disorders such as depression. The spin-off from the University of Bern’s Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine has a cutting-edge understanding of the transport mechanism of endocannabinoids across cell membranes, and is developing inhibitor drugs to restore the brain’s normal activities more precisely and with fewer side effects than current treatments.