Nav Close

Venture Kick Winners Saving Workers’ Bodies and Minds

27.02.2019

BlinkLabs and AUXIVO each win 40,000 francs to lighten the load for people working in quality control, and in construction and logistics.

Venture_Kick_winners_AUXIVO_and_BlinkLabs.png
Winning Venture Kick projects AUXIVO and BlinkLabs
Venture_Kick_winners_Volker_Bartenbach_and_Rrahim_Gashi.png
AUXIVO founder Volker Bartenbach and intern Rrahim Gashi
Venture_Kick_winners_Lucas_Vandroux_and_Juha_Hokkanen.png
BlinkLabs AG co-founders Lucas Vandroux and Juha Hokkanen
Both Zurich-based startups help workers: one applies knowledge of deep learning in software to make quality control less tedious; the other builds on biomechanics research to take the strain for hard-working humans.

AUXIVO: Wearable Support Systems
Work-related injuries cost employers in Europe €30 billion every year. In Switzerland injures due to lifting and carrying cost 370 million francs annually. ETH Pioneer Fellow Volker Bartenbach, whose PhD is in exoskeleton robotics, is developing a light exoskeleton for workers that regularly lift and carry loads as much as 50kg. By reducing the weight on backs and joints, he aims to cut the risk of accidents, chronic injuries, and early retirements.

Bartenbach says exoskeltons have been researched for more than 20 years and are ripe for commercialization. In the past researchers tried to make “Iron Man suits” for every type of work, which resulted in heavy devices too expensive to sell. His innovation is a stripped-down, passive device – one without any motors – that's light enough to be practical and comfortable for workers to wear all day, and cheap enough for companies to equip each employee.


AUXIVO used Venture Kick’s support to conduct field tests with industrial partners in the logistics and construction industries. The startup will refine its two products through the first half of 2019, then plans a seed-round to cover the cost of industrialization, certification and sales. Venture Kick’s training camp with other entrepreneurs helped too:

“The Kickers Camps are intense, and really valuable. You are forced to ask yourself the critical questions, which consciously or subconsciously you may have ignored until then. As a PhD you have deep technical knowledge. The camps help you identify the weak spots in the business aspects of your project," says Bartenbach.

www.venturekick.ch/auxivo


BlinkLabs AG: AI for quality control in manufacturing
Twenty million people perform quality control tasks in global manufacturing supply chains. Humans can be error-prone. To boost productivity BlinkLabs is developing machine-learning-powered software to transform manufacturing operations.

“We used Venture Kick’s stage 1 support to refine our first product. We realized we needed to go one step further into the manufacturers’ processes to deliver a scalable solution for productivity,” says co-founder Lucas Vandroux, a graduate of ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab.

Vandroux met his co-founder Juha Hokkanen while on a research project in China. The pair are currently working with manufacturers in China and Europe to accelerate production and cut the cost of global supply chains.

www.venturekick.ch/blinklabs

Additional Links