Venture kickers highlights: Faceshift, MindMaze, G-Therapeutics
03.03.2017
Venture Kick was the starting point for many successful startups. Learn more about some of the best successes of 2016 and get the "kick" for your startup: CHF 130'000 in pre-seed capital, access to an extended network of investors and experts, and intensive hands-on execution support at the kickers camps. This year Venture Kick will pay out CHF 3 million in total to kick breakthrough idea-stage startup projects and bring Swiss science to global markets. Register all year round on www.venturekick.ch!
FACESHIFT acquired by Apple
After the rumor grew until late 2015, the acquisition of the 2013 Venture Kick winner Faceshift by Apple was finally confirmed by TechCrunch. The startup developed a technology to create animated avatars and other figures that capture a person’s facial expressions in real time. Faceshift’s technology was for example used in the latest Star Wars movie.
MINDMAZE becomes Venture Kick’s first unicorn
Early 2016, the 2010 Venture Kick startup MindMaze closed a USD 100 million seed investment led by Hinduja Group for a valuation of more than USD 1 billion, and became the first “Venture Kick unicorn” in the history of the initiative. The EPFL spin-off won additional international recognition end October 2016, as its CEO Taj Tadi received the “Emerging Entrepreneur” Award by the “EY Entrepreneur of the Year” competition.
G-THERAPEUTICS - 36 million to improve the life of people with spinal-cord injuries
In April 2016, the 2014 Venture Kick startup G-Therapeutics raised EUR 36 million to further develop a therapy combining a spinal cord implant with over ground support training, with the aim to help people with spinal-cord injuries to walk again. The research behind G-Therapeutics, carried at EPFL since more than a decade, enabled paralyzed rats to walk again in 2012. More recently, non-human primates could walk again too, using an innovative brain-spinal interface. The first clinical tests on patients have already started at the University Hospital of Lausanne (CHUV).
