Swiss Trust Tech Startup Acceleration program is live

Tech4Trust is a 4-month startup acceleration program for companies developing innovative solutions to improve trust in an era of disinformation, cyberthreats and global misuse of private and personal data. Today, organizations face many challenges. Access to sensitive data needs to be controlled more efficiently, authentication methods have to be of utmost reliability with the least possible user experience cost. In addition, exchange of information needs guaranteed security, and privacy must be preserved.

“The challenges faced are numerous, and the solutions exist” explains Bastien Rojanawisut, who leads the program at EPFL Innovation Park, together with Lan Zuo Gillet. “There is clearly a need to connect the different actors offering solutions with the organizations facing problems in a collaborative manner”. 

Four months to accelerate Trust Tech

The program consists of expert mentoring, specific workshops related to the industry, and networking activities with companies and experts in the field that will boost the selected startups business development. Startups will be able to meet investors during the demo days, learn to clarify their needs and improve their pitching skills. Last but not least, 9K CHF Cash Prize will be awarded to selected startups.

The program will start in October 2019 and finish in January 2020. The Tech4Trust startup acceleration program is funded by the canton of Vaud through the SPEI, with the wish to connect the actors of the industry by involving most of the big corporates and academia active in the sphere of trust. It is also part of a series of vertical acceleration programs of la Forge, the EPFL Innovation Park’s incubator.

Strong interest in Switzerland 

In Switzerland, both the public and private sectors have shown a strong interest in connecting all actors related to the trust industry. In particular in the canton of Vaud, universities flourished with initiatives addressing the topic: the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) from EPFL was launched, while the cybersecurity competence center Y-Security from HEIG-VD and the Université de Lausanne (Unil) have also developed a lot of expertise in the domain. 

Bastien Rojanawisut further explains that the canton of Vaud and more generally the Lake Geneva area benefits from a unique ecosystem with a large diversity of actors active in the sphere of trust: start-ups, scale-ups, SMEs, large corporations, universities and NPOs. This allowed them to build an outstanding team of coaches and mentors expert in the industry, who all come with their network and sharp understanding of the challenges related to the wide area of trust-related technologies. Their background is very diverse: university professors, successful trust-related startup founders and corporate executives.  

Time to apply 

Applications are already open. The deadline for applying is September 7th. Selected startups will be notified on September 13th, 2019. 

All startups are welcome to apply to this program. However, the program leaders (Lan Zuo Gillet and Bastien Rojanawisut), will select the startups and give priority to those best matching the following criteria:

• Incorporated in Switzerland for less than 7 years.
• Already have a product ready to be sold.
• Are in the phase of acquiring their first customers.
• Are in the field of cybersecurity, authentication, access control, data privacy, anti-counterfeiting, traceability, GDPR, authenticity verification or related.

The program Kick-Off Ceremony is due in October. The date will be announced soon.