CHF 40,000 for startups empowering retailers with AI, revolutionizing analytical testing for health and monitoring machine incidents

Bionter: Revolutionizing analytical testing to improve people’s health
Many liquid drugs contain particles that are critical for patient safety. Sub-visible particle testing is mandatory for any biopharmaceutical preparation during stability testing, drug formulation and process development, and in-process control. However, the technology fulfilling compendial requirements was originally designed to check hydraulic oil used in aerospace and not tailored to the pharmaceutical need. Until today the commonly used technology comprises many manual steps and destroys the sample during testing. The overall particle counter market is over half a billion USD.
Bionter’s team—comprising Tobias Werk, Prof. Hanns-Christian Mahler, Reinhard Vogt, and Marc Funk—works together with the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM), ADS engineering, Pragma Engineering, and Nolato Treff on their first in the first family of tailored solutions for the Drug Product sector: Bionter’s PC100. The revolutionary analytical testing device—supported with single-use consumables, maintenance, and training services, for the biotech’s drug product sector—is based on a new combination of light obscuration technology and smart automation. Different from the existing technologies, Bionter’s PC100 works non-destructively. It requires a smaller sample volume, which can be used for another testing, thus reducing costs. Its smart automation workflow drives efficiency, minimizes human interaction, and improves reliability, data integrity, and patient safety. It also stays compliant with current regulatory requirements, offering a low product-entrance barrier.
The Venture Kick Stage 2 funds will be used for business development until first direct sales to customers. bionter.com

VISENSE: Monitoring machine incidents
Production downtime due to machine errors during a machine’s life cycle is a massive and expensive problem for industrial manufacturers. Manufacturers lose between 5%-20% of their production capacity to downtime, creating up to USD 80,000 in losses per minute. To reduce this downtime, the causes of errors need to be identified as quickly as possible and prevented in the future. However, these processes are still highly manual and unstandardized in many companies. 
VISENSE is a remote error diagnosis solution that provides real-time insights into industrial machine errors. A hardware kit is installed on an underperforming machine in a quick, non-intrusive set-up. The VISENSE solution includes cameras, sensors, network equipment, and an edge computing unit to automatically record and sequence camera footage of error incidents during the production process. The footage gets enriched through additional machine data and machine-learning-based data analytics (e.g., optical flow analysis), identifying regions of interest. This enriched data is made accessible in a globally available platform, which assists in optimizing the processes around the machine (reporting, ramp-up, etc.) and improving the communication between the various stakeholders. 
VISENSE comprises CEO Pia Spori and COO Christian Reich, both from the University of St. Gallen (HSG); CTO Marvin Thiele from Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI); and advisors Dr. Markus Grüneisl (BMW), Prof. Dr. Falk Uebernickl (HPI) and Dr. Mark Kohler (ITMP). The startup’s market can be defined by the number of industrial robots representing the ideal use case for the solution. There are approximately USD 2.7 million operational industrial robots worldwide, bringing the total available market to USD 19 billion. About 10% of these robots are critical or underperforming. In Europe alone, this results in a market of USD 417 million. 
VISENSE will use the Venture Kick funds to accelerate the product development and invest in hardware components (cameras, sensors, edge computing unit) needed to identify the ideal configuration of their diagnostic kit. visense.io