CHF 40,000 for startups empowering built surfaces, developing AI and automation for marketing, and optimizing insect breeding for grasshoppers
05.11.2020
Enerdrape, Meloncast, and SmartBreed Teams win Venture Kick’s second stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their innovations allow turning any existing underground environments into a renewable source of thermal energy for buildings, enable marketers to generate better leads, and optimize insect breeding for grasshoppers.
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 Enerdrape's CEO Margaux Peltier, Lyesse Laloui and CTO Alessandro Rotta Loria
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 Meloncast CEO Sven Boesinger, CMO Raphaela Kurer, Tech Lead Niroj Mahalingam, Data Science Lead Robert
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, Christoph Bertschi Strategy and sales, Patrik Bertschi.jpg) SmartBreed Adrian Bertschi (Technology and IT), Christoph Bertschi Strategy and sales, Patrik Bertschi (Marketing and finance)
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Enerdrape: empowering built surfaces
Today, 50% of the energy consumed in Europe is used for heating and cooling of the buildings and contributes to 40% of CO2 emissions.
Enerdrape, co-founded by CEO Margaux Peltier and CTO Dr. Rotta Loria Alessandro and Prof. Lyesse Laloui from EPFL, leverages a technology that allows turning any existing underground environments, such as underground garages, into a renewable source of thermal energy for buildings' heating and cooling. They developed the first available modular panel-like technology that allows them to capture both geothermal and waste heat from existing underground environments. Their easy-to-install and the cost-competitive solution is adapted to renovation and existing buildings, enabling access to renewable energy in the urban and built environment. Hence, Enerdrape contributes to the mitigating climate impact of the building sector while adding a new dimension to the renewable energy market.
Financing from Venture Kick will accompany the industrialization of the prototypes and partially contribute to the recruiting for the future plan of operations in sales and logistics. enerdrape.com
Smartbreed: Full insect breeding solution out of one hand
Enerdrape, co-founded by CEO Margaux Peltier and CTO Dr. Rotta Loria Alessandro and Prof. Lyesse Laloui from EPFL, leverages a technology that allows turning any existing underground environments, such as underground garages, into a renewable source of thermal energy for buildings' heating and cooling. They developed the first available modular panel-like technology that allows them to capture both geothermal and waste heat from existing underground environments. Their easy-to-install and the cost-competitive solution is adapted to renovation and existing buildings, enabling access to renewable energy in the urban and built environment. Hence, Enerdrape contributes to the mitigating climate impact of the building sector while adding a new dimension to the renewable energy market.
Financing from Venture Kick will accompany the industrialization of the prototypes and partially contribute to the recruiting for the future plan of operations in sales and logistics. enerdrape.com
Meloncast: AI and automation for Marketing
The competition for customer attention is fierce and more and more fought on the battlegrounds of content marketing. Annually over two hundred billion USD are spent globally on content marketing but 60% of all produced digital content is irrelevant and has no impact. Machine learning can dramatically improve the targeting and creation of marketing messages.
With the marketers’ success in mind, Sven Boesiger, PhD. candidate from the University of St. Gallen, and Raphaela Kurer, ex. CMO of an Insurtech startup founded Meloncast, a Spin-Off of the University of St. Gallen. The team of five, consisting of data scientists and marketing specialists, works on a SaaS solution that helps marketers optimize their content marketing and thereby reduces their marketing costs. Meloncast achieves this by providing marketing managers with dynamic relevant topics for their specific target groups and automatically generated marketing messages with the help of state-of-the-art BERT and GPT-2 based machine learning models. Up until now, Meloncast has built a working prototype and is running proofs-of-concept with five companies from the financial sector (e.g. St. Galler Kantonalbank and Baloise). There are no competitors that provide a comparable out-of-the-box solution. Meloncast estimates that the total addressable market for this kind of content marketing solution amounts to seven billion USD.
They plan to use the funds from the VentureKick to improve their language models and further automate their prototype. meloncast.com
With the marketers’ success in mind, Sven Boesiger, PhD. candidate from the University of St. Gallen, and Raphaela Kurer, ex. CMO of an Insurtech startup founded Meloncast, a Spin-Off of the University of St. Gallen. The team of five, consisting of data scientists and marketing specialists, works on a SaaS solution that helps marketers optimize their content marketing and thereby reduces their marketing costs. Meloncast achieves this by providing marketing managers with dynamic relevant topics for their specific target groups and automatically generated marketing messages with the help of state-of-the-art BERT and GPT-2 based machine learning models. Up until now, Meloncast has built a working prototype and is running proofs-of-concept with five companies from the financial sector (e.g. St. Galler Kantonalbank and Baloise). There are no competitors that provide a comparable out-of-the-box solution. Meloncast estimates that the total addressable market for this kind of content marketing solution amounts to seven billion USD.
They plan to use the funds from the VentureKick to improve their language models and further automate their prototype. meloncast.com
Smartbreed: Full insect breeding solution out of one hand
The world population is constantly increasing and our resources are limited. What is needed is an environmental-friendly, sustainable, and healthy protein source.
SmartBreed is a Swiss Agritech start-up that offers insect breeders a local and complete breeding solution. Co-founded by CEO Christoph Bertschi, Adrian Bertschi Ph.D. in Bioengineering at ETH Zürich and Patrik Bertschi Law at HSG, SmartBreed aims to produce automated breeding solutions for grasshoppers. They want to make the advantages of insects industrially usable. Therefore SmartBreed offers stackable, fully automatic breeding boxes in which grasshoppers can be bred cost-effective, resource-saving, and hygienic - local and directly at the customer site. In addition to the sale of breeding boxes, the company offers insect food and insect eggs for breeding, which are automatically processed in the box. Their boxes are equipped with many sensors to constantly optimize the breeding conditions with the collected data. SmartBreed targets Zoos, insect food producers and livestock (incl. pet) feed produces and estimates a significant market size and future growth rate especially in the livestock feed market.
The Venture Kick Funds will primarily be used for new customer acquisition in the different markets. smartbreed.ch
SmartBreed is a Swiss Agritech start-up that offers insect breeders a local and complete breeding solution. Co-founded by CEO Christoph Bertschi, Adrian Bertschi Ph.D. in Bioengineering at ETH Zürich and Patrik Bertschi Law at HSG, SmartBreed aims to produce automated breeding solutions for grasshoppers. They want to make the advantages of insects industrially usable. Therefore SmartBreed offers stackable, fully automatic breeding boxes in which grasshoppers can be bred cost-effective, resource-saving, and hygienic - local and directly at the customer site. In addition to the sale of breeding boxes, the company offers insect food and insect eggs for breeding, which are automatically processed in the box. Their boxes are equipped with many sensors to constantly optimize the breeding conditions with the collected data. SmartBreed targets Zoos, insect food producers and livestock (incl. pet) feed produces and estimates a significant market size and future growth rate especially in the livestock feed market.
The Venture Kick Funds will primarily be used for new customer acquisition in the different markets. smartbreed.ch