Helping marketing campaigns go viral and prevent attacks from cyber criminals: two promising startups kicked by CHF 130.000 each at the Venture Kick final

What if an algorithm could predict collective human behavior and send the right messages to the right people, at the right time and place? For sure, marketers would like to use it to design efficient and viral advertising or electoral campaigns. Hopefully for them, SThAR has got it all. The EPFL spin-off developed a software capable of identifying where and when to deliver a message most effectively and create buzz both on traditional (offline) and online media such as social media.

SThAR: When the laws of physics apply to marketing
SThAR develops predictive softwares based on an emergent science called “sociothermodynamics”. Their algorithms draw on large quantities of telecommunications data from telecommunication companies (i.e. mobility, connectivity) to generate a roadmap with the best places and the best times for executing coordinated marketing actions. SThAR’s predictive models are borrowed from physics, the field of CEO Alberto Hernando: “After my PhD in quantum mechanics and complex systems, I started to study social and economic processes behind electoral results or demographics using mathematical methods. I got fairly good results about describing and predicting population flows and opinion dynamics” he explains. SThAR’s system was successfully tested during local elections in Spain and is now on its way to the market, thanks to the money of Venture Kick: “Venture Kick is not just about the money, but about the support that we found from the excellent professionals to enhance the robustness of our business strategy and make a market entry a reality”. To help him boost his venture, Hernando was recently selected in the venture leaders in Technology team of 2016. He will present his Big Data technology to American investors in June.

xorlab: Defeat sophisticated cyber-attacks beyond conventional and easy to break solutions
Cyber-attacks can bring companies or even states to their knees. Take the attacks on the computers of the German Federal Chancellor and the US State Department last year, or the ones on the American bank HSBC early 2016, which led to the shutdown of its e-banking and mobile services. xorlab’s innovative software solution protects against so-called “client-side attacks” such as “spear phishing”, “watering hole” attacks or “drive-by” infections, which open up a pathway to an organization's IT infrastructure and are usually the first step in a targeted attack. The product, a hardware appliance, can be integrated in the customers’ network and goes beyond conventional computer security solutions. It allows the data coming from external emails (i.e. PDFs, Word or Excel documents) and websites to be scanned, in order to check whether they try to attack the computers of an organization. The victory at Venture Kick comes at the right time for Antonio Barresi, xorlab’s CEO: “We already have two pilot customers. Now, our objective is to deploy our product’s first beta version in a productive environment.” The help of Venture Kick was substantial for Barresi to achieve his goals: “The direct feedback received at the kickers camps were very instructive and the pressure, a real driver. We were forced to dare the next strategic steps and not only focus on the technology.”