Startups developing a test to diagnose faster infectious disease, a healthcare device management system, a kit teaching electronics to kids, a B2B software to enable confidential data collaborations, and augmented reality for geospatial data each win CHF 10,000
22.06.2021
Avelo, BIoT, Ethafa, Tune Insight, and V-Labs win Venture Kick's first stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects establish a point-of-need breath test detecting the 15 most relevant viral and bacterial infections within 20 minutes; find targeted devices in real-time, predicting maintenance, and optimizing the logistics in hospitals; teach programming and electronics to kids from 10 to 12 years through playful interactive stories, and an approach based on gender neutrality and cultural inclusion; enable organizations to make better decisions by extracting collective insights from confidential data collaborations; and provide a patented technology to help surveyors, contractors, and engineers increase their efficiency in the field, verify engineering plans and avoid costly errors during construction.
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 Avelo's CEO Melanie Aregger and CTO Tobias Broger
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 BIoT's CEO David Copain, CTO Andre Veneziano and COO Pierre Bouquet
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 Ethafa's Co-founders CEO Leyla Tawfik and Serena Cangiano
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 V-Labs' CEO Diemer Cohen and CTO Michele Curina
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 Tune Insight: Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux, CEO Dr. Juan Troncoso-Pastoriza and Romain Bouyé
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Avelo: establishing a breath test for fast and actionable infectious disease diagnosis in primary care
20% of all primary care consultations worldwide are due to respiratory infections. They result in 4 million deaths p.a. mainly due to lower respiratory tract infections causing pneumonia. Currently used specimen limit their diagnosis as they miss lower tract infections, are hard to obtain, or highly invasive.
Avelo's Co-founders CEO Melanie Aregger and CTO Tobias Broger with the help of Prof. Dr. Adlhart’s Functional Materials and Nanotechnology group at ZHAW and a renowned advisory board of infectious disease & IVD experts are tackling these issues. Avelo’s vision is to establish a point-of-need breath test detecting the 15 most relevant viral and bacterial infections within 20min. Their test will help to capture these infections early for escalation/de-escalation with prescription of drugs only if useful. This will save lives and healthcare costs and facilitate a targeted use of antibiotics, reducing the >65% unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics in primary care. Their analysis indicates a global market potential in primary care of USD2.3 billion for lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) and USD5.8 billion for all respiratory infections by 2025 growing at ca. 7% p.a. There is no accurate, non-invasive and rapid sampling method based on breath to capture LRTIs in primary care on the market.
Venture Kick’s financing will help them until they can secure the seed round. The proceeds will be used to build up the team and advance the collector for clinical accuracy and usability studies. The key milestone is to establish breath as a new clinically validated specimen with the related collector as the first product delivered to clinical researchers for solving questions such as infectiousness and transmission by 2023. avelolife.com
BIoT: Optimizing device management in the healthcare ecosystem
Ethafa: unlocking the science and technology skills of future inventors with story-led learning and hands-on play
Tune Insight: Orchestrating collaborations on sensitive data
V-Labs: Augmented reality for cm accurate geospatial data
Before civil engineering works take place, a surveyor has to go out to the field to spray the location of underground infrastructures on the street. This is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors that can lead to costly damages to cables and pipes during excavation works. Furthermore, the construction sector is one of the least digitized industries in the world.
V-Labs' technology, developed by CTO Michele Curina, CEO Diemer Cohen Stuart together with Board members Armand Lumens and Anders Thostrup, brings construction plans to the field through AR and helps further digitize the work. They are part of the ESA BIC Switzerland program and have won several awards from for example the European GNSS Agency. V-Labs is a Swiss-based startup that has developed GNSS/RTK-integrated (cm accurate GPS) Augmented Reality solution for AR-glasses allowing their users to visualize, measure, and modify geospatial data with centimeters accuracy in the field. For example, users can visualize GIS-data of underground cables and pipes, but also BIM-data (3D models) for construction projects. Thanks to their patented technology, surveyors, contractors, and engineers can increase their efficiency in the field, verify engineering plans and avoid costly errors during construction. With their solution, the team targets a market of approximately USD 10 billion for GIS analytics and mobile GIS technology, including the US and European markets.
Venture Kick's funds will allow them to grow the team with software engineers and marketing & sales, further develop their product, and successfully roll out their go-to-market phase to prepare for scaling up the business. v-labs.ch
20% of all primary care consultations worldwide are due to respiratory infections. They result in 4 million deaths p.a. mainly due to lower respiratory tract infections causing pneumonia. Currently used specimen limit their diagnosis as they miss lower tract infections, are hard to obtain, or highly invasive.
Avelo's Co-founders CEO Melanie Aregger and CTO Tobias Broger with the help of Prof. Dr. Adlhart’s Functional Materials and Nanotechnology group at ZHAW and a renowned advisory board of infectious disease & IVD experts are tackling these issues. Avelo’s vision is to establish a point-of-need breath test detecting the 15 most relevant viral and bacterial infections within 20min. Their test will help to capture these infections early for escalation/de-escalation with prescription of drugs only if useful. This will save lives and healthcare costs and facilitate a targeted use of antibiotics, reducing the >65% unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics in primary care. Their analysis indicates a global market potential in primary care of USD2.3 billion for lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) and USD5.8 billion for all respiratory infections by 2025 growing at ca. 7% p.a. There is no accurate, non-invasive and rapid sampling method based on breath to capture LRTIs in primary care on the market.
Venture Kick’s financing will help them until they can secure the seed round. The proceeds will be used to build up the team and advance the collector for clinical accuracy and usability studies. The key milestone is to establish breath as a new clinically validated specimen with the related collector as the first product delivered to clinical researchers for solving questions such as infectiousness and transmission by 2023. avelolife.com
BIoT: Optimizing device management in the healthcare ecosystem
60 to 90 min are wasted daily by each caregiver due to lost or damaged devices. Patients' lives are endangered because of a lack of visibility on the condition of certain devices. Solving these problems will allow caregivers to focus uncompromisingly, on the care and treatment of patients.
To address these limitations, BIoT CEO David Compain, COO Pierre Bouquet, and CTO Andrea Veneziano are in a good discussion with different hospitals and clinics to collaborate and keep developing their technology (Computer Science labs). Both Pierre and Andrea are still at EPFL finishing their Master's. BIoT is developing tracking devices from all tracking technologies (BLE, UWB, …) with an IoT architecture, joined to a web-based platform fuelling an Artificial Intelligence optimising the operation of hospitals. This system aims at on one hand, reducing cost (mental charge, time, space, and money spent on device management) and on the other hand expanding the capabilities (real-time tracking and status of any type of devices, geofencing and dynamic inventory). BioT is enabling employees to refocus their time on valuable tasks. The healthcare system is lagging in terms of digital transformation and is struggling with a lack of medical staff and budget for hospitals in Europe. Moreover, the existing solutions are insufficient to meet the daily difficulties. The market size is huge, with an average price of our solution of CHF100'000 per year per hospital BIoT will focus initially on Switzerland with 300 hospitals and a market of CHF30 million per year, before expanding on the European market of CHF3 billion per year.
The Venture Kick funds will help with the R&D and Human resources creating the platform and the hardware solution to be stable for their first pilot client. biot.webflow.io
Ethafa: unlocking the science and technology skills of future inventors with story-led learning and hands-on play
Digital skills development is the key challenge of competitive economies. USA, China, Middle East, Russia, Switzerland are investing to raise the K12 digital makers (USD3 billion markets only in Abu Dhabi and Dubai). However, STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) are still perceived as boring and irrelevant by young students. There is a lack of tools and methods that simplify STEAM and make it engaging and, above all, gender-balanced. Opening STEAM education to every child already in primary schools will help fill the gap in one of the fastest-growing job categories.
Ethafa's core team is Co-Founders CEO Leyla Tawfik, an Interaction Designer, and Serena Cangiano, a Researcher at SUPSI and Head of FabLab Lugano. Key advisors are Massimo Banzi, Matteo Loglio, Lorenzo Romagnoli. The Ethafa kit teaches programming and electronics to kids from 10 to 12 years through playful interactive stories, and an approach based on gender neutrality and cultural inclusion. It is made of a physical kit, a tablet application with interactive stories. The kit consists of 5 programmable characters that can be assembled and then used to interact with the tablet application, featuring challenges that require problem-solving and programming skills to be solved. The Ethafa kit is the first product of the company whose aim is to release novel approaches and contents to support the digital transformation in education through the inclusion of 21st-century skills in learning, from technology literacy to team collaboration and storytelling. The project addresses different market sectors: - The Global STEM market size to reach USD 9.5 billion by 2025 growing at a CAGR 0f 7% during 2020-2025; The Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) toys and games sector that is expected to grow at a rate of 10.3 per cent to reach $3.3 billion by 2022. The sector of maker education in informal contexts counts the Fab Lab network representing 1,000 Fab Labs in more than 40 countries, 1,400 makers spaces, more than 100 STEAM addressing specifically girls.
Ethafa's core team is Co-Founders CEO Leyla Tawfik, an Interaction Designer, and Serena Cangiano, a Researcher at SUPSI and Head of FabLab Lugano. Key advisors are Massimo Banzi, Matteo Loglio, Lorenzo Romagnoli. The Ethafa kit teaches programming and electronics to kids from 10 to 12 years through playful interactive stories, and an approach based on gender neutrality and cultural inclusion. It is made of a physical kit, a tablet application with interactive stories. The kit consists of 5 programmable characters that can be assembled and then used to interact with the tablet application, featuring challenges that require problem-solving and programming skills to be solved. The Ethafa kit is the first product of the company whose aim is to release novel approaches and contents to support the digital transformation in education through the inclusion of 21st-century skills in learning, from technology literacy to team collaboration and storytelling. The project addresses different market sectors: - The Global STEM market size to reach USD 9.5 billion by 2025 growing at a CAGR 0f 7% during 2020-2025; The Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) toys and games sector that is expected to grow at a rate of 10.3 per cent to reach $3.3 billion by 2022. The sector of maker education in informal contexts counts the Fab Lab network representing 1,000 Fab Labs in more than 40 countries, 1,400 makers spaces, more than 100 STEAM addressing specifically girls.
The Venture Kick funds will be used to roll out key collaboration partnership on the co-creation of contents and new components of the kit, to finance the set-up of the small scale manufacturing chain and investigate the trademark and design rights protection. ethafa.com
Tune Insight: Orchestrating collaborations on sensitive data
Today’s organizations are heavily data-centric. More than 56% of the companies in the enterprise data and analytics market acknowledge that their own data is not enough to make sound decisions, and they plan on expanding their ability to source external data. Nevertheless, their expansion and collaboration with others on sensitive or confidential data are prevented due to the risk of data leaks or because of data-privacy concerns and regulations.
Tune Insight B2B software enables organizations to make better decisions by extracting collective insights from confidential data collaborations, while each participating organization remains in full control of their own data. The data is never transferred or disclosed, thanks to Tune Insight's patent-pending Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption technology. Tune Insight serves companies in the enterprise data and analytics market, estimated at USD 100 billion, with strong ties into the machine learning and homomorphic encryption markets, respectively projected at USD 117 billion and USD 266 billion in 2027. Tune Insight's founding team is composed of CEO Juan Troncoso-Pastoriza, Romain Bouyé, and Jean-Pierre Hubaux. Dr. Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza is a senior researcher at the EPFL Laboratory for Data Security (lds.epfl.ch) led by Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux. While incubating at EPFL, Tune Insight has produced a health pilot and proof-of-concept prototypes paid by customers in cyberdefense and insurance.
The Venture Kick funds will be used to support the development and maturation of the ongoing prototypes and pilots, optimize the product-market-fit, and enable the engagement of the first recurring paying customer by the end of 2021, out of those with which they are working on PoCs and pilots. tuneinsight.com
V-Labs: Augmented reality for cm accurate geospatial data
Before civil engineering works take place, a surveyor has to go out to the field to spray the location of underground infrastructures on the street. This is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors that can lead to costly damages to cables and pipes during excavation works. Furthermore, the construction sector is one of the least digitized industries in the world.
V-Labs' technology, developed by CTO Michele Curina, CEO Diemer Cohen Stuart together with Board members Armand Lumens and Anders Thostrup, brings construction plans to the field through AR and helps further digitize the work. They are part of the ESA BIC Switzerland program and have won several awards from for example the European GNSS Agency. V-Labs is a Swiss-based startup that has developed GNSS/RTK-integrated (cm accurate GPS) Augmented Reality solution for AR-glasses allowing their users to visualize, measure, and modify geospatial data with centimeters accuracy in the field. For example, users can visualize GIS-data of underground cables and pipes, but also BIM-data (3D models) for construction projects. Thanks to their patented technology, surveyors, contractors, and engineers can increase their efficiency in the field, verify engineering plans and avoid costly errors during construction. With their solution, the team targets a market of approximately USD 10 billion for GIS analytics and mobile GIS technology, including the US and European markets.
Venture Kick's funds will allow them to grow the team with software engineers and marketing & sales, further develop their product, and successfully roll out their go-to-market phase to prepare for scaling up the business. v-labs.ch