Startups developing chiral analytics, personalized patient-positioning medical devices, micro-franchising of water goods, the best boron nitride for next generation of electronics, and underwater drones for work in all waters each win CHF 10,000
23.01.2023
ENANTIOS, HeroSupport, Openversum, SwissBN, and Tethys Robotics win Venture Kick's first stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects develop a new instrument that is able to better measure chiral molecules through an optical technique called Raman optical activity; aim to improve cancer treatment effectiveness, safety, cost-efficiency, and universal access with personalized patient-positioning medical devices and standardized workflows and services; tackle the urgent issue of providing water without fecal contamination by combining cutting-edge drinking water filter technology with micro-franchising; enables semiconductor manufacturers to achieve faster, smaller, cooler and durable electronic devices without compromising scalability and no need of switching to a completely new material system; and develops underwater drones for work in all waters.
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 ENANTIOS co-founders Dr. Carin Lightner and Stefan Meyer
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 HeroSupport CEO Giovanna Dipasquale and CTO Johan Uiterwijk
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 Openversum CIO Lorenzo Donadio, CTO Laura Stocco, and CEO Olivier Gröninger
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 SwissBN scientific advisor Thomas Greber, CEO Huanyao Cun, CTO Adrian Hemmi
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 Tethys Robotics co-founders Andrej Studer, Pragash Sivananthaguru,Jonas Wüst and Johannes Lienhart
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ENANTIOS: Using chiral analytics to streamline the drug development process
Developing new pharmaceutical drugs is slow and expensive. To enable pharmaceuticals to be developed faster and more cheaply, more testing must be done in the pre-clinical stage. Because the function of a molecule as a drug is strongly dependent on its 3-dimensional shape, understanding molecular shape is key to reaching this goal. ENANTIOS enables more pre-clinical testing of the three-dimensional structure of chiral molecules, which represent over 60% of drugs on the market and are often particularly difficult to measure.
ENANTIOS' team has developed a new instrument that is able to better measure chiral molecules through an optical technique called Raman optical activity (ROA). The team consists of co-founders Dr. Carin Lightner and Stefan Meyer, and ETH Professor Dr. David Norris who is on the advisory board. The instrument they developed is a benchtop analytical tool that gives industry, research, and academic facilities easier access to chiral analytics. They will market their device as well as a measurement service to laboratories in industry and academia.
The Venture Kick funds will allow them to first secure their IP, then begin customer demos and the design and construction of their commercial instrument. In addition to the funds provided, the Venture Kick program will help them to refine their business case and attract the investors needed for their seed investment round. enantios.ch
HeroSupport: Innovative immobilization devices to personalize medical treatments
Radiotherapy is an effective treatment for breast cancer (1 out of 8 women). However, radiation side-effects include skin burns (a burden for hospitals and very stressful for patients), lung cancer (5%), and cardiac deaths (3-5%). Prone treatment compared to supine reduces skin burns, lung cancer deaths by 70%, and cardiac death risks, because in prone the breast naturally detaches from the thorax. The problem is that setting up the patient in a prone position to the required precision in every treatment session (5 to 35) is very difficult and therefore prone is not used in all hospitals.
HeroSupport aims to improve cancer treatment effectiveness, safety, cost-efficiency, and universal access with personalized patient-positioning medical devices and standardized workflows and services. The founders of the company are CEO Giovanna Dipasquale and CTO Johan Uiterwijk. HeroSupport is a spin-off of HUG, where Giovanna Dipasquale works as a medical physicist developing the device. The initial products are personalized immobilization devices for breast cancer radiotherapy, specifically targeted at prone breast treatment. Their solution is a personalized, 3D-printed, MRI-compatible, breast shell for perfect, comfortable, and fast positioning in prone, called VENUS SHELL™. The patient's breast is 3D scanned while lying in the treatment position on their dedicated Eye-table™. Their proprietary software turns the scan into a shell which is then 3D printed. The shell model adapts to existing treatment boards already in use by the hospital. They will provide a full service of scanning, modeling, and printing, mostly for showcasing while moving to an on-demand modeling-only service with 3rd party printing. In 2020, there were 2.26M new breast cancer cases worldwide, of which 50% go through radiotherapy (RT) serviced by more than 7000 RT centers (RTCs). HeroSupport's SAM consists of 0.4M patients/year at RT centers in the US, CA, AU, and selected EU countries.
The Venture Kick first stage money of CHF 10K will be used for detailing the business plan. They will hire a certification company to investigate how their competition got their certifications, defining the best solutions for them as well as the necessary budgets. Then, it will cover travel costs to their first potential partners and initial customers to collect their feedback, grow their network, and survey the market. www.herosupport.care
Openversum: Microfranchising of locally manufactured water goods
Two billion people still struggle to get water without faecal contamination, and too many many still rely on contaminated water and suffer from resulting water-borne diseases that can be fatal because of a lack of medical assistance. As a consequence, 300.000 children cannot make it to their fifth birthday each year, and millions have to miss school or workdays. Most live in rural areas and do not get the same opportunity to retain a secure source of income and contribute to the economy or the societal change needed to address the climate crisis.
Openversum tackles this urgent issue by combining cutting-edge drinking water filter technology with micro-franchising. CEO Dr. Olivier Gröninger has worked on this project since 2017 as part of his Ph.D. Thesis. CTO Laura Stocco is a water and behavior change expert. Their third co-founder and CIO, Lorenzo Donadio, is equipped with energy and data science know-how and possesses great strategic thinking. Together, they empower water entrepreneurs with the tools, materials, and business know-how to produce and distribute drinking water filters locally. Their novel membrane (patent pending) filter is highly efficient and cost-effective and quickly removes pathogens, heavy metals, and micropollutants from water. Their filter does not require energy to run and can replace traditional methods such as water boiling, thereby preventing greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks to their pilot study and local entrepreneurs in Ecuador and Colombia, over 400 people now have access to clean water. Their micro-franchising ecosystem and digital operational platform allow them to scale fast to improve millions of lives in a matter of years. With their solution, they can address 1.8 Million people by 2026.
The Venture Kick funding of CHF 10k will be used for field work addressing the implementation of the digital platform with local entrepreneurs, the design validation in the field, and the initial training of local entrepreneurs in Colombia. www.openversum.com
SwissBN: The best boron nitride for the next generation of electronics
Silicon technology meets material limit at nanometer scale. What is next? By fabricating computer chips with new materials, IBM has proven that an electronic switching speed of more than 100 GHz is well achievable. This is 20x faster than the current speed. However, such proof-of-concept devices are based on new materials that are only available in small sizes, which are comparable to silicon 30 years ago. Considering the global annual substrate area of electronic chips of ~15 billion square inches, the above-mentioned IBM technology is not scalable enough. The SwissBN approach is different and based on the given high-quality and high-scalable silicon substrates, where boron nitride (BN) is coated with an additional treatment step. Laboratory-scale experiments have shown that such coating enables similar performance leaps compared to IBM as long as the boron nitride material fulfills certain quality criteria.
SwissBN's team is composed of CEO Huanyao Cun; CTO Adrian Hemmi, and scientific advisor Prof. Thomas Greber. Currently, Huanyao and Adrian are working as scientists at the Surface Physics Group of Physik-Institut at the University of Zurich (UZH). They fabricate BN materials at wafer-scale in the Sinergia lab (a cleanroom). Their scalable and high-quality boron nitride enables semiconductor manufacturers to achieve faster, smaller, cooler, and more durable electronic devices without compromising scalability and no need of switching to a completely new material system. At the moment, wafer-scale fabrication of high-quality BN remains a big challenge and it is not yet available on the market. Within the European Graphene Flagship, the team has access to a network of approximately 170 research groups, where the SwissBN coatings are currently being distributed, tested, and optimized.
The Venture Kick grant will be used to cover expenses related to prototype fabrication and development, including customer visits, customer requirements analysis, and marketing of their material. In addition, the grant will enable them to satisfy special prototype requirements of the customers, such as the processing of unconventional sizes and shapes. www.swissbn.ch
Tethys Robotics: Search, inspection, and surveillance missions in all waters
Underwater work is costly and hazardous, and yet the need for underwater work is stronger than ever. Worldwide, still, more than 150 fatalities of commercial divers are reported each year. Moreover, divers are typically limited to a depth of 40 m, although offshore installations (9,200 wind, oil, and gas sites) have depths of 60-150 m, and hydropower plants (over 57,000 worldwide)
can be nearly 300 m deep. Finally, work in rivers is not possible 80% of the time due to bad weather and currents above 1 m/s, although it is urgent to carry out bridge inspections or search operations.
Tethys Robotics develops underwater drones for work in all waters. The team is composed of Co-founder and project manager Jonas Wüst, Co-founder and operations lead Pragash Sivananthaguru, and Co-founders Andrej Studer and Johannes Lienhart, who lead the core areas of R&D with five highly motivated team members. With the development of the world's first underwater drone for high-current waters such as rivers, they offer a solution to professionals who want to complete their tasks safely, reliably, and efficiently. The collected and processed data is provided to customers who conduct all types of underwater search and recovery operations, as well as inspections, mapping, and exploration under all conditions. The modular combination of industry-leading sensors in their own built sensor fusion algorithm enables the autonomous navigation of their drone. Coupled with their AI-powered data collection pipeline, high-resolution 3D models of underwater structures can be reconstructed. The annual global underwater drone market was valued at more than USD 3.4 billion in 2021 with a CAGR of 12% in the forecast period of 2022-2027. The global market is driven by the increasing applications of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) in oceanographic studies and the rising application in the defense and security sector. Within this market, Tethys Robotics focuses on the areas of inspection & surveillance as well as defense & security. Currently, based on relationships with local authorities in Europe, they are focusing on the search and recovery segment as an entry market, where they expect annual turnovers of up to USD 80 million.
The Venture Kick financial support will allow them to conduct field tests with partners, visit customers and participate in industry events and trade fairs, not only in Switzerland but on an international level. tethys-robotics.ch
Developing new pharmaceutical drugs is slow and expensive. To enable pharmaceuticals to be developed faster and more cheaply, more testing must be done in the pre-clinical stage. Because the function of a molecule as a drug is strongly dependent on its 3-dimensional shape, understanding molecular shape is key to reaching this goal. ENANTIOS enables more pre-clinical testing of the three-dimensional structure of chiral molecules, which represent over 60% of drugs on the market and are often particularly difficult to measure.
ENANTIOS' team has developed a new instrument that is able to better measure chiral molecules through an optical technique called Raman optical activity (ROA). The team consists of co-founders Dr. Carin Lightner and Stefan Meyer, and ETH Professor Dr. David Norris who is on the advisory board. The instrument they developed is a benchtop analytical tool that gives industry, research, and academic facilities easier access to chiral analytics. They will market their device as well as a measurement service to laboratories in industry and academia.
The Venture Kick funds will allow them to first secure their IP, then begin customer demos and the design and construction of their commercial instrument. In addition to the funds provided, the Venture Kick program will help them to refine their business case and attract the investors needed for their seed investment round. enantios.ch
HeroSupport: Innovative immobilization devices to personalize medical treatments
Radiotherapy is an effective treatment for breast cancer (1 out of 8 women). However, radiation side-effects include skin burns (a burden for hospitals and very stressful for patients), lung cancer (5%), and cardiac deaths (3-5%). Prone treatment compared to supine reduces skin burns, lung cancer deaths by 70%, and cardiac death risks, because in prone the breast naturally detaches from the thorax. The problem is that setting up the patient in a prone position to the required precision in every treatment session (5 to 35) is very difficult and therefore prone is not used in all hospitals.
HeroSupport aims to improve cancer treatment effectiveness, safety, cost-efficiency, and universal access with personalized patient-positioning medical devices and standardized workflows and services. The founders of the company are CEO Giovanna Dipasquale and CTO Johan Uiterwijk. HeroSupport is a spin-off of HUG, where Giovanna Dipasquale works as a medical physicist developing the device. The initial products are personalized immobilization devices for breast cancer radiotherapy, specifically targeted at prone breast treatment. Their solution is a personalized, 3D-printed, MRI-compatible, breast shell for perfect, comfortable, and fast positioning in prone, called VENUS SHELL™. The patient's breast is 3D scanned while lying in the treatment position on their dedicated Eye-table™. Their proprietary software turns the scan into a shell which is then 3D printed. The shell model adapts to existing treatment boards already in use by the hospital. They will provide a full service of scanning, modeling, and printing, mostly for showcasing while moving to an on-demand modeling-only service with 3rd party printing. In 2020, there were 2.26M new breast cancer cases worldwide, of which 50% go through radiotherapy (RT) serviced by more than 7000 RT centers (RTCs). HeroSupport's SAM consists of 0.4M patients/year at RT centers in the US, CA, AU, and selected EU countries.
The Venture Kick first stage money of CHF 10K will be used for detailing the business plan. They will hire a certification company to investigate how their competition got their certifications, defining the best solutions for them as well as the necessary budgets. Then, it will cover travel costs to their first potential partners and initial customers to collect their feedback, grow their network, and survey the market. www.herosupport.care
Openversum: Microfranchising of locally manufactured water goods
Two billion people still struggle to get water without faecal contamination, and too many many still rely on contaminated water and suffer from resulting water-borne diseases that can be fatal because of a lack of medical assistance. As a consequence, 300.000 children cannot make it to their fifth birthday each year, and millions have to miss school or workdays. Most live in rural areas and do not get the same opportunity to retain a secure source of income and contribute to the economy or the societal change needed to address the climate crisis.
Openversum tackles this urgent issue by combining cutting-edge drinking water filter technology with micro-franchising. CEO Dr. Olivier Gröninger has worked on this project since 2017 as part of his Ph.D. Thesis. CTO Laura Stocco is a water and behavior change expert. Their third co-founder and CIO, Lorenzo Donadio, is equipped with energy and data science know-how and possesses great strategic thinking. Together, they empower water entrepreneurs with the tools, materials, and business know-how to produce and distribute drinking water filters locally. Their novel membrane (patent pending) filter is highly efficient and cost-effective and quickly removes pathogens, heavy metals, and micropollutants from water. Their filter does not require energy to run and can replace traditional methods such as water boiling, thereby preventing greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks to their pilot study and local entrepreneurs in Ecuador and Colombia, over 400 people now have access to clean water. Their micro-franchising ecosystem and digital operational platform allow them to scale fast to improve millions of lives in a matter of years. With their solution, they can address 1.8 Million people by 2026.
The Venture Kick funding of CHF 10k will be used for field work addressing the implementation of the digital platform with local entrepreneurs, the design validation in the field, and the initial training of local entrepreneurs in Colombia. www.openversum.com
SwissBN: The best boron nitride for the next generation of electronics
Silicon technology meets material limit at nanometer scale. What is next? By fabricating computer chips with new materials, IBM has proven that an electronic switching speed of more than 100 GHz is well achievable. This is 20x faster than the current speed. However, such proof-of-concept devices are based on new materials that are only available in small sizes, which are comparable to silicon 30 years ago. Considering the global annual substrate area of electronic chips of ~15 billion square inches, the above-mentioned IBM technology is not scalable enough. The SwissBN approach is different and based on the given high-quality and high-scalable silicon substrates, where boron nitride (BN) is coated with an additional treatment step. Laboratory-scale experiments have shown that such coating enables similar performance leaps compared to IBM as long as the boron nitride material fulfills certain quality criteria.
SwissBN's team is composed of CEO Huanyao Cun; CTO Adrian Hemmi, and scientific advisor Prof. Thomas Greber. Currently, Huanyao and Adrian are working as scientists at the Surface Physics Group of Physik-Institut at the University of Zurich (UZH). They fabricate BN materials at wafer-scale in the Sinergia lab (a cleanroom). Their scalable and high-quality boron nitride enables semiconductor manufacturers to achieve faster, smaller, cooler, and more durable electronic devices without compromising scalability and no need of switching to a completely new material system. At the moment, wafer-scale fabrication of high-quality BN remains a big challenge and it is not yet available on the market. Within the European Graphene Flagship, the team has access to a network of approximately 170 research groups, where the SwissBN coatings are currently being distributed, tested, and optimized.
The Venture Kick grant will be used to cover expenses related to prototype fabrication and development, including customer visits, customer requirements analysis, and marketing of their material. In addition, the grant will enable them to satisfy special prototype requirements of the customers, such as the processing of unconventional sizes and shapes. www.swissbn.ch
Tethys Robotics: Search, inspection, and surveillance missions in all waters
Underwater work is costly and hazardous, and yet the need for underwater work is stronger than ever. Worldwide, still, more than 150 fatalities of commercial divers are reported each year. Moreover, divers are typically limited to a depth of 40 m, although offshore installations (9,200 wind, oil, and gas sites) have depths of 60-150 m, and hydropower plants (over 57,000 worldwide)
can be nearly 300 m deep. Finally, work in rivers is not possible 80% of the time due to bad weather and currents above 1 m/s, although it is urgent to carry out bridge inspections or search operations.
Tethys Robotics develops underwater drones for work in all waters. The team is composed of Co-founder and project manager Jonas Wüst, Co-founder and operations lead Pragash Sivananthaguru, and Co-founders Andrej Studer and Johannes Lienhart, who lead the core areas of R&D with five highly motivated team members. With the development of the world's first underwater drone for high-current waters such as rivers, they offer a solution to professionals who want to complete their tasks safely, reliably, and efficiently. The collected and processed data is provided to customers who conduct all types of underwater search and recovery operations, as well as inspections, mapping, and exploration under all conditions. The modular combination of industry-leading sensors in their own built sensor fusion algorithm enables the autonomous navigation of their drone. Coupled with their AI-powered data collection pipeline, high-resolution 3D models of underwater structures can be reconstructed. The annual global underwater drone market was valued at more than USD 3.4 billion in 2021 with a CAGR of 12% in the forecast period of 2022-2027. The global market is driven by the increasing applications of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) in oceanographic studies and the rising application in the defense and security sector. Within this market, Tethys Robotics focuses on the areas of inspection & surveillance as well as defense & security. Currently, based on relationships with local authorities in Europe, they are focusing on the search and recovery segment as an entry market, where they expect annual turnovers of up to USD 80 million.
The Venture Kick financial support will allow them to conduct field tests with partners, visit customers and participate in industry events and trade fairs, not only in Switzerland but on an international level. tethys-robotics.ch