Startups developing 3D-printed medical devices, microengineered hybrid fibers, an online marketplace for insurance, digital health interventions, and a device for visually impaired users win CHF 10,000 each
10.02.2021
4Devices Medical, Antefil, Excede, OptiChronix, and SoundMap win Venture Kick's first stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects use 3D-printing to create tiny medical devices to tackle life-threatening conditions, hybrid fiber preforms to provide efficiency, quality, and sustainability for large scale composite structures, an online platform that helps insurances securitize risk, digital health interventions to improve brain health early, and a device for visually impaired users, equipped with a camera, able to provide real-time information on the surrounding environment of a person through directional sounds.
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 4Devices Medical: CEO Dr. Carmela De Marco, former researcher at ETH Zurich; CMO Dr. med. Gaston De Bernardis, pediatric surgeon FMH; CFO Gianluca Roscioli, PhD student at MIT
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 Antefil's team members from left to right: CSO Paolo Ermanni, CEO & CFO Christoph Schneeberger, and COO Nicole Aegerter. Photo credit to Lea Ladner: www.lealadner.com
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 Excede: Eduard Melli, CEO and Founder; Simone D'Avico, Software Engineer; Emanuele Aliverti, Data Scientist; Anna Annoni, Behavioral Officer
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 OptiChronix's Founder Rene Gilvert, Co-founder and Medical Officer Roger Bullock, CTO Ivan Peric, Philippe Krolicki, COO Anna Grabowski, JD Mark Edwards, and Compliance and Regulatory Officer Albrecht Tribukait
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 SoundMap's team from left to right: CEO Maël Fabien, Software Engineer Rudolf Braun, and CTO Bruno Vollmer
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4Devices Medical: 3D-printed medical devices
Antefil: Microengineered hybrid fibers
Today's greatest challenge in realizing energy-efficient structures from fibre-reinforced plastics lies in the capacity to manufacture high quality parts quickly and cost-effectively. This limits their availability for high volume production markets. To tackle this issue, Founders CEO & CFO Dr. Christoph Schneeberger from ETH Zürich, COO Nicole Aegerter, CSO Prof. Dr. Paolo Ermanni, and Advisors Dr. Tomas Brenner, head of ETH ieLab, and Prof. Dr. Joanna Wong are working together on the Antefil project. Antefil Composite Tech will revolutionize high volume composites manufacturing by providing textile preforms made from glass fibres which are individually clad in a meltable, recyclable plastic. Their mission is to expedite the transition of the global composites industry to a more cost- and energy-efficient future, helping previously untouched markets adapt advanced lightweight materials. To achieve these goals, they redefine the limits of cycle time, preform cost and laminate quality encountered in high-volume composites production.
The Venture Kick funds will be used to sample production for pilot tests, develop pilot marketing strategy, and cover the exhibitions costs. Interns will be hired on temporary contracts. Their goal is to have a first sample delivered to pilot customer until Q3/2021. antefil.com
Excede: Online marketplace for insurance securitization
On one side, insurance companies are facing increasing constraint on capital, continuous change in frequency and severity of events, and inability to price new risks. On the other side, fixed income investors struggle to find securities with positive yields, and are always on the look for investment with low correlation to their existing portfolios. The existing solutions are often illiquid, expensive and not transparent. Excede's Co-founders CEO Eduard Melli, CTO Simone D'Avico, Research assistant at USI Anna Annoni, and Emanuele Aliverti are working together to develop a B2B platform that helps insurances to systematically securitize the risks they have underwritten, and to transfer them to the capital markets. By doing so, insurances free up capacity for more risk underwriting, can charge lower premium, need less capital, increase their ROE, decrease their earnings volatility and can cede risk at a cheap price. For investors, Insurance-linked securities provide attractive risk-adjusted returns which are completely uncorrelated to traditional asset classes. Initially, Excede will provide a marketplace where investors, through a smart auction process, can bid for portfolio of securitized risks. The second step will be to integrate directly with each insurance in order to access their risk portfolios and systematically securitize and cede them.
They plan to use the Venture Kick financing to support the development of the platform, hire an actuary as a consultant, and invest in business development initiatives. excede.io
OptiChronix: Preserving Brain Health, Wellbeing & Independent Living for Longer
SoundMap: changing the lifes of blind and visually impaired people
Every year, just in the US, two billion dollars are spent in healthcare to treat hydrocephalus, with one billion for revision surgeries alone. Using the 4D stent by 4Devices Medical would limit treatment to one single surgery, thus avoiding the additional expenses. CEO Dr. Carmela De Marco, former researcher at ETH Zurich; CMO Dr. med. Gaston De Bernardis, pediatric surgeon FMH; CFO Gianluca Roscioli, PhD student at MIT; and Medical Advisor Prof. Dr. med. Raphael Guzman are working on 4Devices Medical and have developed a new technology for 3D printing thermoplastic and shape memory polymers (4D printing) at a micro/milli-scale, with a complexity never used before. With their solution, 4Device Medical will introduce to the market new surgical devices such as the 4D stent to treat hydrocephalus in babies, a long-lasting solution that minimizes surgical operations and increases patients’ life quality.
They intend to use Venture Kick financing stage I for market research as well as advertising material, to help with the future fundraising steps. They currently have a first proof of concept, and their goal is to soon build a first prototype to better attract investors. 4devices-medical.com
Antefil: Microengineered hybrid fibers
Today's greatest challenge in realizing energy-efficient structures from fibre-reinforced plastics lies in the capacity to manufacture high quality parts quickly and cost-effectively. This limits their availability for high volume production markets. To tackle this issue, Founders CEO & CFO Dr. Christoph Schneeberger from ETH Zürich, COO Nicole Aegerter, CSO Prof. Dr. Paolo Ermanni, and Advisors Dr. Tomas Brenner, head of ETH ieLab, and Prof. Dr. Joanna Wong are working together on the Antefil project. Antefil Composite Tech will revolutionize high volume composites manufacturing by providing textile preforms made from glass fibres which are individually clad in a meltable, recyclable plastic. Their mission is to expedite the transition of the global composites industry to a more cost- and energy-efficient future, helping previously untouched markets adapt advanced lightweight materials. To achieve these goals, they redefine the limits of cycle time, preform cost and laminate quality encountered in high-volume composites production.
The Venture Kick funds will be used to sample production for pilot tests, develop pilot marketing strategy, and cover the exhibitions costs. Interns will be hired on temporary contracts. Their goal is to have a first sample delivered to pilot customer until Q3/2021. antefil.com
Excede: Online marketplace for insurance securitization
On one side, insurance companies are facing increasing constraint on capital, continuous change in frequency and severity of events, and inability to price new risks. On the other side, fixed income investors struggle to find securities with positive yields, and are always on the look for investment with low correlation to their existing portfolios. The existing solutions are often illiquid, expensive and not transparent. Excede's Co-founders CEO Eduard Melli, CTO Simone D'Avico, Research assistant at USI Anna Annoni, and Emanuele Aliverti are working together to develop a B2B platform that helps insurances to systematically securitize the risks they have underwritten, and to transfer them to the capital markets. By doing so, insurances free up capacity for more risk underwriting, can charge lower premium, need less capital, increase their ROE, decrease their earnings volatility and can cede risk at a cheap price. For investors, Insurance-linked securities provide attractive risk-adjusted returns which are completely uncorrelated to traditional asset classes. Initially, Excede will provide a marketplace where investors, through a smart auction process, can bid for portfolio of securitized risks. The second step will be to integrate directly with each insurance in order to access their risk portfolios and systematically securitize and cede them.
They plan to use the Venture Kick financing to support the development of the platform, hire an actuary as a consultant, and invest in business development initiatives. excede.io
OptiChronix: Preserving Brain Health, Wellbeing & Independent Living for Longer
Chronic conditions with globally aging populations are rising in cost and management complexity and traditional healthcare models cannot be sustained in terms of approach, resources and scale. Cost and populations affected are rising. The strong association of multimorbidity with age is well recognized yet more than half of people with multimorbidity and two-thirds with physical –mental health comorbidity are younger than 65 years; most chronic condition are modifiable or reversible. Social determinants of health are not integrated in current solutions.
OptiChronix's Founder Rene Gilvert, former Brand Director of Neuroscience at Novartis, Roger Bullock, Co-founder and Medical Officer, acclaimed researcher in AD, director of Kingshill Research Centre (NHS), CTO Ivan Peric, 20 years of software development for SAAS, Philippe Krolicki, former Market Access and Pricing Director for Pfizer, COO Anna Grabowski, JD Mark Edwards, Patent Lawyer and Albrecht Tribukait, Compliance and Regulatory Officer, a seasoned professional in Regulatory Affairs are working together to tackle this issues.
OptiChroniX is a Swiss Digital Therapeutics company dedicated to improving brain health early. They strive to optimize lifestyle and make medicine smart, so as to improve clinical outcomes, quality of life, cost-effectiveness and budget impact of clinical treatment. At OptiChroniX, they develop digital health interventions at the intersection of biomedical, behavioural, computing and engineering research, deployed on smartphones to personalize and track a patients and caregivers health progress by collecting data from wearables and nearables. The informed choices offered aim to provide tailored coaching in order to improve health literacy and medication adherence, and to positively impact modifiable factors primarily responsible for the cognitive decline in patients affected by dementia.
They intend to use the funds to complete development of the actual advisor to a stage that they are allowed to enter the German market under the DiGA law. optichronix.com
SoundMap: changing the lifes of blind and visually impaired people
Blindness and visual impairment affect close to 300 million people in the world. Blind people have trouble understanding their environment and rely on touch, for nearest objects, or hearing, to identifying the position of surrounding objects that produce sound. SoundMap is a smart device for autonomous navigation, that captures the environment through cameras, and provides intuitive feedback to guide the user. The device uses advanced computer vision algorithms to prevent colision with obstacles. Maël Fabien, CEO and Ph.D. student at EPFL, Bruno Vollmer, CTO and computer vision engineer, and Rudolf Braun, signal processing engineer, built SoundMap to bring innovations of the AI industry to the world of assistive devices.
Venture Kick funds will allow SoundMap to deliver additional test devices to partners, work on the design of the product and offer part-time contracts in software and hardware. soundmap.io