Startups empowering retailers with AI, developing motor-actuated fitness, revolutionizing analytical testing for health, providing first-class tailored data, and monitoring machine incidents each win CHF 10,000

AI Retailer Systems: Empowering retailers to checkout-free convenience
Offline retail, a EUR 12 trillion market, is losing share as shoppers increasingly go online, more so post-COVID-19. Clearly, shoppers appreciate “anytime and anyplace” shopping. Offline shopping, however,  is usually neither nearby nor 24/7 nor convenient, and its operating costs prohibit the operation of small store formats. This is the driving reason why retailers don’t open shops in less populated dwellings. The ETH Zurich spin-off AI Retailer Systems (AIRS)—comprising CEO Alejandro Garcia, COO Maran Pereirasamy, CTO Alex Popovic, and ML and CV lead R. Mörzinger—addresses this issue. The AIRS team builds tech that uses using computer vision and AI to automatically answer “who took what” in retail with the highest accuracy and lowest cost. When combined with payment processing, this technological break-through enables the operation of profitable checkout-free stores even in less urban areas. Retailers can now have extended opening hours and eliminate waiting time to process payments. 
In addition, AI Retailer Systems’ computer-vision-based checkout-free solution allows digitizing the point of sales and delivering the relevant insights to retailers to improve operations and increase sales with detailed in-store floor and shelf-level analytics. This can pave the way for new business model innovations for Retail-space-as-a-Service via autonomous stores. With conservative estimations looking alone at the DACH grocery sector, AI Retailer Systems looks at a total addressable market of CHF 1.3 billion, and upside potential lies with video surveillance and analytics. AI Retailer System has welcomed interested investors as it is closing its Seed round over the next few months. The team plans to use the Venture Kick funds to continue with the product development and the execution of the existing pipeline of projects. airetailersystems.com

AkroSports: Motor-actuated fitness
More weight can be handled when a muscle lowers a weight compared to when lifting it. Traditional isolated training is inefficient because muscles are only trained “on the way up.” Isokinetic training is the most efficient training approach because only the speed is set, and the athlete applies a counterforce trying to stop the machine. This results in a dynamically adjusted load 30,000 times per second: It creates constant muscle stimulation throughout the entire range of motion, increases bone density, and is gentle on the joints. Just one minute of exercise is enough for total muscle exhaustion. Current machines aiming for similar results are large, bulky, and very expensive. Therefore, they are only used by professional Olympic athletes.
The team of AkroSports includes CEO Björn Joos, CTO Sebastian Tschabold, and Varin Buff—all ETH Zürich graduates—Cäcilia Schwegler, who is an HSG graduate, and advisor Anil Sethi. The team develops a weight emulation system based on electric motors. They have been working on this technology for five years. Their motor controller and smart algorithms allow them to use low-cost hardware while achieving perfectly smooth movement (USP). The user is offered two control modes. One allows for free adjustable weights via the app, whereas in the second, our smart app suggests a workout program tailored to the user’s needs. The workout data can be displayed and recorded in high resolution. The use of electric motors enables training modes such as eccentric, isometric, isokinetic, stability, weight, and distribution plans. Our first portable device is shaped like a stepper with two ropes on each side and weighs only 17 kg. Despite its compact format, it offers up to 180 kg of training weight. The team has developed a full-body workout program that consists of seven exercises, completed in only seven minutes, and results in complete muscle exhaustion. The traget market includes approximately 12,000 gyms in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria combined. Funding from the Venture Kick will be invested in the first batch of the final device for app development and CE certification. akrosports.com

Bionter: Revolutionizing analytical testing to improve people’s health
Many liquid drugs contain particles that are critical for patient safety. Sub-visible particle testing is mandatory for any biopharmaceutical preparation during stability testing, drug formulation and process development, and in-process control. However, the technology fulfilling compendial requirements was originally designed to check hydraulic oil used in aerospace and not tailored to the pharmaceutical need. Until today the commonly used technology comprises many manual steps and destroys the sample during testing. The overall particle counter market is over half a billion USD.
Bionter’s team—comprising Tobias Werk, Prof. Hanns-Christian Mahler, Reinhard Vogt, and Marc Funks—works together with the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM), ADS engineering, Pragma Engineering, and Nolato Treff on their first in the first family of tailored solutions for the Drug Product sector: Bionter’s PC100. The revolutionary analytical testing device—supported with single-use consumables, maintenance, and training services, for the biotech’s drug product sector—is based on a new combination of light obscuration technology and smart automation. Different from the existing technologies, Bionter’s PC100 works non-destructively. It requires a smaller sample volume, which can be used for another testing, thus reducing costs. Its smart automation workflow drives efficiency, minimizes human interaction, and improves reliability, data integrity, and patient safety. It also stays compliant with current regulatory requirements, offering a low product-entrance barrier.
The Venture Kick funds will be used for the next major milestones: the minimal viable product readiness and associated early customer review and business development until first direct sales to customers. bionter.com

Datacie: Providing first-class tailored data
Every year, 2.5 trillion PDFs are created, enclosing data the financial industry needs to extract on a real-time basis. Originally created to display rich textual content to facilitate human digital collaborations, these unstructured documents are widely misused as data storage formats. For instance, they are the de facto standard for public companies to share valuable data and information with investors, regulators, and other market participants. This misusage leaves no choice to financial data vendors, such as exchanges and market data aggregators, to perform manual data entry—a process described as fastidious, error-prone, and costly.
Datacie, co-founded by CEO Robin Slomian and CTO Timothée Savoy from HEC Lausanne (UNIL), is an AI company that provides unique alternative and traditional datasets across the financial industry. Along with Technical Lead Daniel Peppicelli from the EPFL, the three partners strongly believe that everyone can benefit from data to make better decisions, improve efficiency, and even help tackle some of the world’s most pressing societal challenges. Datacie combines proprietary computer vision and natural language processing algorithms to extract precise data points from unstructured data sources, resulting in unique, actionable, and fully customized data products for their clients. Operating under a licensing business model, Datacie currently maintains a data catalog that counts six ESG, legal, and real estate databases covering the world’s public companies and funds. Datacie also offers data extraction services for clients seeking to automate their data collection process, meet specific data-related requirements, or obtain intellectual property rights in data crafted for them. In 2019, global spend on financial data and analysis increased by 5.6% to USD 31 billion. More than USD 6 billion from this amount is spent conjointly on APIs and data feed solutions, representing Datacie’s SAM. Datacie plans to achieve CHF 700K in ARR by the end of the fiscal year 2021, in line with the target of reaching CHF 70 million in ARR within the next six years. The Datacie team will use the Venture Kick financing to consolidate their document acquisition pipelines, expand their R&D team, and acquire new customers via S&M initiatives. datacie.com

VISENSE: Monitoring machine incidents
Production downtime due to machine errors during a machine’s life cycle is a massive and expensive problem for industrial manufacturers. Manufacturers lose between 5%-20% of their production capacity to downtime, creating up to USD 80,000 in losses per minute. To reduce this downtime, the causes of errors need to be identified as quickly as possible and prevented in the future. However, these processes are still highly manual and unstandardized in many companies. 
VISENSE is a remote error diagnosis solution that provides real-time insights into industrial machine errors. A hardware kit is installed on an underperforming machine in a quick, non-intrusive set-up. The VISENSE solution includes cameras, sensors, network equipment, and an edge computing unit to automatically record and sequence camera footage of error incidents during the production process. The footage gets enriched through additional machine data and machine-learning-based data analytics (e.g., optical flow analysis), identifying regions of interest. This enriched data is made accessible in a globally available platform, which assists in optimizing the processes around the machine (reporting, ramp-up, etc.) and improving the communication between the various stakeholders. 
VISENSE comprises CEO Pia Spori and COO Christian Reich, both from the University of St. Gallen (HSG); CTO Marvin Thiele from Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI); and advisors Dr. Markus Grüneisl (BMW), Prof. Dr. Falk Uebernickl (HPI) and Dr. Mark Kohler (ITMP). The startup’s market can be defined by the number of industrial robots representing the ideal use case for the solution. There are approximately USD 2.7 million operational industrial robots worldwide, bringing the total available market to USD 19 billion. About 10% of these robots are critical or underperforming. In Europe alone, this results in a market of USD 417 million. 
VISENSE will use the Venture Kick funds to accelerate the product development and invest in hardware components (cameras, sensors, edge computing unit) needed to identify the ideal configuration of their diagnostic kit. visense.io