Startups developing a playful app for students, an AI-based Pneumoscope, an online platform to oversee clinical trial in real-time, and an AI-based animal voice recognizer each win CHF10,000
18.03.2022
Brian, Onescope, Rivia, and Wildlife-Box win Venture Kick's first stage of entrepreneurial and financial support. Their projects develop a social and competitive app for students to master exams playfully, a unique autonomous multi-parameter stethoscope called Pneumoscope using artificial intelligence, make Biotechs more operationally efficient throughout clinical trials, and build an AI-based system that can be used in nature to recognize animals by their voice.
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 BRIAN's Co-founder Forsbach Ralph
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 Onescope Team from left to right: Alexandre Perez, Daniela Blagoeva, Antonin Gervaix, Alain Gervaix
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 Rivia Team from left to right: Executive Chairman Pietro Scalfaro, CTO Tiago Kieliger, CMO Henk Streefkerk, CEO Erik Scalfaro
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 Wildlife_Box Team from left to right: COO Miya Ferrisse, Chief AI Officer Adrian Jörg, CEO Olivier Stähli, CTO Noah Schmid
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Brian: a social and competitive app for students to master exams playfully
Learning at institutions has not become truly digital yet and remains fragmentary and inefficient. Teachers do not have real-time insight into the learning progress of their students and therefore cannot adapt to their needs. For students, on the other hand, learning is often lonely and boring. In addition, the materials are often provided chaotically and non-digital.
Brian's co-founders CEO Ralph Forsbach CTO Rubén Frank developed a social learning platform for both learners and educators. The University of St. Gallen is a deeply rooted project partner of Brian. They are not only supported conceptually but also as an essential partner to test the learning software in the field. The educational application helps students access, study, and exchange knowledge with peers in a playful way while presenting educators the obtained data to adapt and perform beyond current standards. They do this by creating an engaging learning environment on learners’ smartphones that removes the hassle of analog, solitary, and monotonous learning. The team believes in a future of higher education where learning is highly individualized, fun, social, sustainably efficient, and effective. The use of algorithms, storytelling and game mechanics enable us to fulfill this promise. Ultimately, higher education around the globe is estimated to be 227 million students and is designed likewise and prone to their digital solution. The market has seen 4% annual growth over the past 20 years and is in a major turnaround due to home-schooling and Covid.
They plan to use the Venture Kick's fund to better test and know the market, to further develop the app’s front end, and to continue growing their customer base. brian.study
Learning at institutions has not become truly digital yet and remains fragmentary and inefficient. Teachers do not have real-time insight into the learning progress of their students and therefore cannot adapt to their needs. For students, on the other hand, learning is often lonely and boring. In addition, the materials are often provided chaotically and non-digital.
Brian's co-founders CEO Ralph Forsbach CTO Rubén Frank developed a social learning platform for both learners and educators. The University of St. Gallen is a deeply rooted project partner of Brian. They are not only supported conceptually but also as an essential partner to test the learning software in the field. The educational application helps students access, study, and exchange knowledge with peers in a playful way while presenting educators the obtained data to adapt and perform beyond current standards. They do this by creating an engaging learning environment on learners’ smartphones that removes the hassle of analog, solitary, and monotonous learning. The team believes in a future of higher education where learning is highly individualized, fun, social, sustainably efficient, and effective. The use of algorithms, storytelling and game mechanics enable us to fulfill this promise. Ultimately, higher education around the globe is estimated to be 227 million students and is designed likewise and prone to their digital solution. The market has seen 4% annual growth over the past 20 years and is in a major turnaround due to home-schooling and Covid.
They plan to use the Venture Kick's fund to better test and know the market, to further develop the app’s front end, and to continue growing their customer base. brian.study
Onescope: AI-based Pneumoscope
When facing lungs related pathologies such as bronchitis, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, tuberculose, asthma, or even COVID-19 people have limited options for diagnosis but visit a medical doctor for auscultation. Interpretation of the lungs' sound through a stethoscope is a science that requires years of practice and that cannot be performed at home. What if digital stethoscopes and Artificial Intelligence could change the status quo?
To answer this question, Onescope was founded by Chairman Prof. Alain Gervaix, and run together with CEO Antonin Gervaix, CTO Alexandre Perez, COO Daniela Blagoeva, Business Developer Matthias Vanoni and EPFL Partner in charge of machine learning Mary-Anne Hartley. Onescope's team is developing a unique autonomous multi-parameter stethoscope called Pneumoscope using artificial intelligence (AI) for lung sounds classification, disease severity grading, and clinical outcome prediction. Lung sounds, oxygen blood saturation, heart rate, and temperature are simultaneously transmitted to a mobile app for analysis in real-time and recognition of respiratory sound signatures by AI algorithms. The app informs the user of the likely diagnosis, the severity of the condition and suggests appropriate management to the best care pathway. In the likes of COVID pandemics, the ability to self-diagnostic would make every subscriber an active player against a global threat. People would own a Pneumoscope in the same way they own a thermometer. They target Europe with a CE marked Class 2 medical device and the addressable and obtainable market is estimated at 45'000 users by 2026 and 200'000+ by 2028, representing over a CHF 90 million revenues.
They plan to use the Venture Kick Stage 1 funds to build 10 prototypes and a companion app enabling data collection and user feedback before industrialisation and certification of the product.
Rivia: an online platform for Biotechs to oversee clinical trials in real-time
Drug companies, called Biotechs, develop medical treatments by conducting study experiments on humans that assess the safety and efficacy of their developing drugs. These studies are called clinical trials. To operate clinical trials, Biotechs rely on many costly external services that cost millions or tens of millions. The data is fragmented across these services and in many formats, like many excel sheets and word docs. All this is slow and error-prone. Inefficient data collection puts patients and Biotechs at risk. The difficulty to oversee clinical trials causes delays.
Rivia, founded by CEO Erik Scalfaro, CTO Tiago Kieliger, CMO Henk Streefkerk, and Executive Chairman Pietro Scalfaro, develops software solutions to resolve the data chaos in drug development, making Biotechs more operationally efficient throughout clinical trials. Their software automatically combines data, irrespective of the source, so that Biotechs can oversee clinical trials in real-time. Users access their platform to perform all medical and operational assessments in one unified location. The serviceable addressable market is estimated at 3 billion EUR given the 20,000 on-going early phase clinical trials (Phase 1 & 2), where Rivia can price at 150,000 EUR per trial. Their target in 2022-24 is the 1000 EU-based Biotechs with +8000 phase 1/2 clinical trials.
The Venture Kick funds will help them to build and launch their online platform, get initial customer traction and expand the customer base. Over the course of 2022, the spending will be distributed between workforce, overheads costs, and marketing costs.
Wildlife-Box: AI-based animal voice recognizer
The wolf population is growing rapidly and the existing and expensive monitoring methods such as DNA analysis are reaching their capacity limits due to their high workload. Currently, CHF 5,500 per wolf per year is spent on wolf monitoring in Switzerland, excluding the work of the rangers. There is a need for an automated solution that provides real-time data at a fair price. The lack of data causes more conflicts between humans and wolves than necessary.
Wildlife-Box is led by Olivier Staehli pursuing the project at EPFL in his master's program. In total, 8 students from computer science, life science, and engineering are working on it. A team will be formed from these students in spring 2022. Wildlife-Box is an AI-based system that can be used in nature to recognize animals by their voice and was developed at Uni Bern. The voices of certain species such as wolves can be heard over several kilometers. This allows large areas to be covered quickly,
cost-effectively, and automatically. The data helps minimize conflicts between humans and wildlife to promote coexistence and strengthen biodiversity. The system is applicable to all species that communicate over long distances and have some interest in being monitored such as lions, hyenas, elephants, or wolves. The aim is to sell the hardware and develop an additional platform for data management, offered as SaaS. The market demand in Europe is about 24'000 devices, with an increasing demand of 25% due to the fast-growing wolf population.
The CHF 10,000 financial support from stage one will be used for the prototype improvement and the field tests.
When facing lungs related pathologies such as bronchitis, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, tuberculose, asthma, or even COVID-19 people have limited options for diagnosis but visit a medical doctor for auscultation. Interpretation of the lungs' sound through a stethoscope is a science that requires years of practice and that cannot be performed at home. What if digital stethoscopes and Artificial Intelligence could change the status quo?
To answer this question, Onescope was founded by Chairman Prof. Alain Gervaix, and run together with CEO Antonin Gervaix, CTO Alexandre Perez, COO Daniela Blagoeva, Business Developer Matthias Vanoni and EPFL Partner in charge of machine learning Mary-Anne Hartley. Onescope's team is developing a unique autonomous multi-parameter stethoscope called Pneumoscope using artificial intelligence (AI) for lung sounds classification, disease severity grading, and clinical outcome prediction. Lung sounds, oxygen blood saturation, heart rate, and temperature are simultaneously transmitted to a mobile app for analysis in real-time and recognition of respiratory sound signatures by AI algorithms. The app informs the user of the likely diagnosis, the severity of the condition and suggests appropriate management to the best care pathway. In the likes of COVID pandemics, the ability to self-diagnostic would make every subscriber an active player against a global threat. People would own a Pneumoscope in the same way they own a thermometer. They target Europe with a CE marked Class 2 medical device and the addressable and obtainable market is estimated at 45'000 users by 2026 and 200'000+ by 2028, representing over a CHF 90 million revenues.
They plan to use the Venture Kick Stage 1 funds to build 10 prototypes and a companion app enabling data collection and user feedback before industrialisation and certification of the product.
Rivia: an online platform for Biotechs to oversee clinical trials in real-time
Drug companies, called Biotechs, develop medical treatments by conducting study experiments on humans that assess the safety and efficacy of their developing drugs. These studies are called clinical trials. To operate clinical trials, Biotechs rely on many costly external services that cost millions or tens of millions. The data is fragmented across these services and in many formats, like many excel sheets and word docs. All this is slow and error-prone. Inefficient data collection puts patients and Biotechs at risk. The difficulty to oversee clinical trials causes delays.
Rivia, founded by CEO Erik Scalfaro, CTO Tiago Kieliger, CMO Henk Streefkerk, and Executive Chairman Pietro Scalfaro, develops software solutions to resolve the data chaos in drug development, making Biotechs more operationally efficient throughout clinical trials. Their software automatically combines data, irrespective of the source, so that Biotechs can oversee clinical trials in real-time. Users access their platform to perform all medical and operational assessments in one unified location. The serviceable addressable market is estimated at 3 billion EUR given the 20,000 on-going early phase clinical trials (Phase 1 & 2), where Rivia can price at 150,000 EUR per trial. Their target in 2022-24 is the 1000 EU-based Biotechs with +8000 phase 1/2 clinical trials.
The Venture Kick funds will help them to build and launch their online platform, get initial customer traction and expand the customer base. Over the course of 2022, the spending will be distributed between workforce, overheads costs, and marketing costs.
Wildlife-Box: AI-based animal voice recognizer
The wolf population is growing rapidly and the existing and expensive monitoring methods such as DNA analysis are reaching their capacity limits due to their high workload. Currently, CHF 5,500 per wolf per year is spent on wolf monitoring in Switzerland, excluding the work of the rangers. There is a need for an automated solution that provides real-time data at a fair price. The lack of data causes more conflicts between humans and wolves than necessary.
Wildlife-Box is led by Olivier Staehli pursuing the project at EPFL in his master's program. In total, 8 students from computer science, life science, and engineering are working on it. A team will be formed from these students in spring 2022. Wildlife-Box is an AI-based system that can be used in nature to recognize animals by their voice and was developed at Uni Bern. The voices of certain species such as wolves can be heard over several kilometers. This allows large areas to be covered quickly,
cost-effectively, and automatically. The data helps minimize conflicts between humans and wildlife to promote coexistence and strengthen biodiversity. The system is applicable to all species that communicate over long distances and have some interest in being monitored such as lions, hyenas, elephants, or wolves. The aim is to sell the hardware and develop an additional platform for data management, offered as SaaS. The market demand in Europe is about 24'000 devices, with an increasing demand of 25% due to the fast-growing wolf population.
The CHF 10,000 financial support from stage one will be used for the prototype improvement and the field tests.