CHF 40,000 for automated outdoor security patrolling, 300 x faster nano-chip production, personalized patient-positioning medical devices, and underwater drones for work in all waters
24.03.2023
Ascento, Chiral, HeroSupport, and Tethys Robotics win Venture Kick's second stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects offer a Robotics-as-a-Service for autonomous outdoor security patrolling, produce qubits 300x faster and can grow more than 500 nanomaterials on a single chip, aim to improve cancer treatment effectiveness, safety, cost-efficiency, and universal access with personalized patient-positioning medical devices and standardized workflows and services, and develop underwater drones for work in all waters.
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 Ascento's team from left to right: Dominik Mannhart (Hardware & Design), Ciro Salzmann (Electronics & Software), Miguel de la Iglesia Valls (CTO), and Alessandro Mora (CEO & CBDO)
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 Chiral co-founders: CEO Seoho Jung, CTO Natanael Lanz, CPO André Butzérin
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 HeroSupport CEO Giovanna Dipasquale and CTO Johan Uiterwijk
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 Tethys Robotics co-founders Andrej Studer, Pragash Sivananthaguru,Jonas Wüst and Johannes Lienhart
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Ascento: Automated outdoor security patrolling
The global security market has USD 263 billion in annual revenue; however, it has low profitability (ca. 3% net margin) and low growth. This is not only because of very high production costs due to a “guard-focused” operating model, where labor costs alone account for around 80% of total sales; it is also because revenue growth has been subdued due to the immense difficulties in recruiting, onboarding, training, and retaining guards. It is so acute that incumbent security providers cannot serve all their customers due to a shortage of guards.
To tackle this challenge, Ascento offers a Robotics-as-a-Service for autonomous outdoor security patrolling. Ascento RaaS security solution includes three elements. Firstly, the Ascento robot can systematically and cost-efficiently patrol 24/7. Secondly, a technical support center, a cloud-based backend to monitor mission execution, and manually teleoperate the robot for specific patrols or inspections. And thirdly, the security analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities to proactively prevent and detect security issues and automatically generate customer-specific security reporting (Ascento Security Solution). Ascento already kicked off its first pilot and has letters of intent validating the assumptions from major security providers.
The project started as a focus project at the Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH, and continued over five years with multiple follow-up projects on improving technology (robot design, autonomy, control). The founders are Alessandro Morra (CEO & CBDO ), Miguel de la Iglesia Valls (CTO), Dominik Mannhart (Hardware & Design), and Ciro Salzmann (Electronics & Software). They have attracted key experts in autonomy and cloud development to accelerate the mission.
The Venture Kick funding will allow Ascento to invest in its growth needs, scale up production, and increase the number of customer deployments over the next six months. www.ascento.ch
Chiral: 300 x faster nano-chip production
The chip industry has been actively trying to introduce nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes and graphene into semiconductor devices. These materials, which are among the smallest, cleanest, and most conductive materials on the planet, enable unprecedented quantum computing chips, IoT sensors, and healthcare devices. Today's nanoelectronics market is valued at USD 200 billion already and is projected to reach USD 400 billion in the next 5 years. In today's industry, fast and automated production of nanoelectronic devices remains the biggest bottleneck in their penetration into the mainstream market.
Chiral, an ETH/Empa spin-off from a 4-year federal research consortium, aims to break this bottleneck with its competencies in nanotechnology, machine learning, and high-precision engineering. With their patented technologies and know-how, the founders CEO Seoho Jung, CTO/COO Natanael Lanz, and CPO Andre Butzerin are already producing nanotube-based chips and sensors 300x faster and have a clear roadmap for further R&D. They have already delivered their first order to a customer in the quantum computing sector and have secured more customers in different verticals.
They plan to use the funds from the Venture Kick stages 1 and 2 for legal and business services as well as payment of first employee salaries.
HeroSupport: Innovative immobilization devices to personalize medical treatments
Radiotherapy is an effective breast cancer treatment affecting 1 out of 8 women. However, radiation side-effects include skin burns (a burden for hospitals and very stressful for patients), lung cancer (5%), and cardiac deaths (3-5%). Prone treatment compared to supine reduces skin burns by 35%, lung cancer deaths by 70%, and cardiac death risks, because in prone the breast naturally detaches from the thorax. The problem is that setting up the patient in a prone position to the required precision in every treatment session (5 to 35) is very difficult and therefore prone is not used as often as it should.
HeroSupport aims to improve cancer treatment effectiveness, safety, and cost-efficiency using an innovative positioning system. The founders of the company are CEO Giovanna Dipasquale and CTO Johan Uiterwijk. HeroSupport is a spin-off of Geneva University Hospital, where Giovanna Dipasquale works as a medical physicist and developed the device. The company combines know-how, hardware & software tools, with new digital technologies to address radiotherapy patient positioning issues.
The initial product is a personalized immobilization device specifically developed for prone breast radiotherapy treatment, called VENUS SHELL™. The patient's breast is 3D scanned while lying in the treatment position on their dedicated EYE-table™.HeroSupport's software turns the scan into a shell which is then 3D printed. The resulting MRI-compatible breast shell attaches to the treatment boards already in use by the hospital, and results in perfect, comfortable, and fast positioning in prone.
HeroSupport will provide a full service of scanning, modeling, and printing. In 2020, there were 2.26M new breast cancer cases worldwide, of which 50% go through radiotherapy (RT) serviced by more than 7000 RT centers. HeroSupport's SAM consists of 0.4M patients/year at RT centers in the US, CA, AU, and selected EU countries.
The Venture Kick second stage money of CHF 40K will be used to demonstrate the product's clinical and economic benefits in a few pilot centers, starting with Italy and Switzerland. The collected data will also serve to certify the products and procedures for regulatory approval in order to start sales at the end of 2023. www.herosupport.care
Tethys Robotics: Enable barrier-free underwater work
The aquatic environments offer essential resources, opportunities, and information only accessible by time and resource-intensive underwater work. The global market is driven by the increasing need for renewable energy solutions (offshore wind & hydropower plants) and applications for autonomous oceanographic exploration and inspection. Based on relationships with authorities in Europe, Tethys Robotics is focusing on search and recovery tasks including police activities like people search or unexploded ordnance disposal on construction sites. Today, the most common method to search and recover objects and people underwater is to use professional divers, who accept the risks of permanent or lethal damages. Their work is loaded with danger and difficulty including decompression sickness, carbon dioxide toxicity, drowning, exposure to cold, nitrogen narcosis, and significant psychological and physical stress. These fundamental risks can be traced back to the partially unsolved challenges in the underwater industry, such as poor visibility, fast-flowing waters (e.g. due to tides or in rivers), and high personnel demands.
To address these problems, Tethys Robotics developed the world's only underwater drone that can operate autonomously in all waters, finally enabling operations in strong water flows with poor visibility. By this means, it will greatly contribute to mitigating significant risks divers face every day while drastically reducing the needed personnel involved in underwater work. The underwater drone, in combination with a VR-enabled and highly intuitive user interface, not only enables the search and identification of objects at depths of up to 300 m in the harshest of conditions but also enables the safe recovery of bodies and objects thanks to a bionically inspired soft gripper. The interdisciplinary team has been working together for 5 years and consists of Co-founder and project manager Jonas Wüst, Co-founder and operations lead Pragash Sivananthaguru, and Co-founders Andrej Studer and Johannes Lienhart, who lead the core areas of R&D with five highly motivated team members.
The Venture Kick financial support will allow them to conduct field tests with partners, visit customers and participate in industry events and trade fairs, not only in Switzerland but on an international level. tethys-robotics.ch
The global security market has USD 263 billion in annual revenue; however, it has low profitability (ca. 3% net margin) and low growth. This is not only because of very high production costs due to a “guard-focused” operating model, where labor costs alone account for around 80% of total sales; it is also because revenue growth has been subdued due to the immense difficulties in recruiting, onboarding, training, and retaining guards. It is so acute that incumbent security providers cannot serve all their customers due to a shortage of guards.
To tackle this challenge, Ascento offers a Robotics-as-a-Service for autonomous outdoor security patrolling. Ascento RaaS security solution includes three elements. Firstly, the Ascento robot can systematically and cost-efficiently patrol 24/7. Secondly, a technical support center, a cloud-based backend to monitor mission execution, and manually teleoperate the robot for specific patrols or inspections. And thirdly, the security analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities to proactively prevent and detect security issues and automatically generate customer-specific security reporting (Ascento Security Solution). Ascento already kicked off its first pilot and has letters of intent validating the assumptions from major security providers.
The project started as a focus project at the Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH, and continued over five years with multiple follow-up projects on improving technology (robot design, autonomy, control). The founders are Alessandro Morra (CEO & CBDO ), Miguel de la Iglesia Valls (CTO), Dominik Mannhart (Hardware & Design), and Ciro Salzmann (Electronics & Software). They have attracted key experts in autonomy and cloud development to accelerate the mission.
The Venture Kick funding will allow Ascento to invest in its growth needs, scale up production, and increase the number of customer deployments over the next six months. www.ascento.ch
Chiral: 300 x faster nano-chip production
The chip industry has been actively trying to introduce nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes and graphene into semiconductor devices. These materials, which are among the smallest, cleanest, and most conductive materials on the planet, enable unprecedented quantum computing chips, IoT sensors, and healthcare devices. Today's nanoelectronics market is valued at USD 200 billion already and is projected to reach USD 400 billion in the next 5 years. In today's industry, fast and automated production of nanoelectronic devices remains the biggest bottleneck in their penetration into the mainstream market.
Chiral, an ETH/Empa spin-off from a 4-year federal research consortium, aims to break this bottleneck with its competencies in nanotechnology, machine learning, and high-precision engineering. With their patented technologies and know-how, the founders CEO Seoho Jung, CTO/COO Natanael Lanz, and CPO Andre Butzerin are already producing nanotube-based chips and sensors 300x faster and have a clear roadmap for further R&D. They have already delivered their first order to a customer in the quantum computing sector and have secured more customers in different verticals.
They plan to use the funds from the Venture Kick stages 1 and 2 for legal and business services as well as payment of first employee salaries.
HeroSupport: Innovative immobilization devices to personalize medical treatments
Radiotherapy is an effective breast cancer treatment affecting 1 out of 8 women. However, radiation side-effects include skin burns (a burden for hospitals and very stressful for patients), lung cancer (5%), and cardiac deaths (3-5%). Prone treatment compared to supine reduces skin burns by 35%, lung cancer deaths by 70%, and cardiac death risks, because in prone the breast naturally detaches from the thorax. The problem is that setting up the patient in a prone position to the required precision in every treatment session (5 to 35) is very difficult and therefore prone is not used as often as it should.
HeroSupport aims to improve cancer treatment effectiveness, safety, and cost-efficiency using an innovative positioning system. The founders of the company are CEO Giovanna Dipasquale and CTO Johan Uiterwijk. HeroSupport is a spin-off of Geneva University Hospital, where Giovanna Dipasquale works as a medical physicist and developed the device. The company combines know-how, hardware & software tools, with new digital technologies to address radiotherapy patient positioning issues.
The initial product is a personalized immobilization device specifically developed for prone breast radiotherapy treatment, called VENUS SHELL™. The patient's breast is 3D scanned while lying in the treatment position on their dedicated EYE-table™.HeroSupport's software turns the scan into a shell which is then 3D printed. The resulting MRI-compatible breast shell attaches to the treatment boards already in use by the hospital, and results in perfect, comfortable, and fast positioning in prone.
HeroSupport will provide a full service of scanning, modeling, and printing. In 2020, there were 2.26M new breast cancer cases worldwide, of which 50% go through radiotherapy (RT) serviced by more than 7000 RT centers. HeroSupport's SAM consists of 0.4M patients/year at RT centers in the US, CA, AU, and selected EU countries.
The Venture Kick second stage money of CHF 40K will be used to demonstrate the product's clinical and economic benefits in a few pilot centers, starting with Italy and Switzerland. The collected data will also serve to certify the products and procedures for regulatory approval in order to start sales at the end of 2023. www.herosupport.care
Tethys Robotics: Enable barrier-free underwater work
The aquatic environments offer essential resources, opportunities, and information only accessible by time and resource-intensive underwater work. The global market is driven by the increasing need for renewable energy solutions (offshore wind & hydropower plants) and applications for autonomous oceanographic exploration and inspection. Based on relationships with authorities in Europe, Tethys Robotics is focusing on search and recovery tasks including police activities like people search or unexploded ordnance disposal on construction sites. Today, the most common method to search and recover objects and people underwater is to use professional divers, who accept the risks of permanent or lethal damages. Their work is loaded with danger and difficulty including decompression sickness, carbon dioxide toxicity, drowning, exposure to cold, nitrogen narcosis, and significant psychological and physical stress. These fundamental risks can be traced back to the partially unsolved challenges in the underwater industry, such as poor visibility, fast-flowing waters (e.g. due to tides or in rivers), and high personnel demands.
To address these problems, Tethys Robotics developed the world's only underwater drone that can operate autonomously in all waters, finally enabling operations in strong water flows with poor visibility. By this means, it will greatly contribute to mitigating significant risks divers face every day while drastically reducing the needed personnel involved in underwater work. The underwater drone, in combination with a VR-enabled and highly intuitive user interface, not only enables the search and identification of objects at depths of up to 300 m in the harshest of conditions but also enables the safe recovery of bodies and objects thanks to a bionically inspired soft gripper. The interdisciplinary team has been working together for 5 years and consists of Co-founder and project manager Jonas Wüst, Co-founder and operations lead Pragash Sivananthaguru, and Co-founders Andrej Studer and Johannes Lienhart, who lead the core areas of R&D with five highly motivated team members.
The Venture Kick financial support will allow them to conduct field tests with partners, visit customers and participate in industry events and trade fairs, not only in Switzerland but on an international level. tethys-robotics.ch