IMAGINE IF! Swiss Final highlights promising ventures

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01.03.2019
IF Lausanne audience award
The Swiss Finals of the IMAGINE IF! Accelerator were held last Thursday at EPFL. On this occasion, the Jury of the Pitch Competition gave five prizes, rewarding four promising Swiss startups. Startupticker.ch contacted Claudia Bigoni, President of IF Lausanne, to learn more about the evening and winners.

IMAGINE IF! Global Accelerator held last week its Swiss Finals in Lausanne. Following the launch of the program on Dec 12th, the accelerator announced 10 deep-tech finalists out of more than 30 applicants. From that moment on until February 26th, the ventures received a tailored mentorship, explains Claudia Bigoni, President of Innovation Forum Lausanne. 

Lots of insights shared

During the finals event, Prof. Marc Gruber, Vice-President for Innovation at EPFL, gave an insightful presentation, talking about the Lemanic Region ecosystem, showcasing different entrepreneurial opportunities and suggesting some strategies to follow when building a startup. Some advices based on the personal experience also came from the talks given by Diego Dupuy, CTO of Lunaphore and Serge Gander, CEO of Combagroup. As representatives of successful startups in the field of healthcare and cleantech, both gave inspiring pitches to the finalists and all the science-entrepreneurs in the audience.

A high level competition 

After the presentations came the pitch competition where each startup was given 3 minutes to present their project plus 2 minutes of questions by the jury committee. The latter was composed as follows: - Patrick Biro, Innovation Program Director, VentureKick - Alison Michan, Data Scientist at EPFL Innovation Satellite - Buhler Group - Olivier Philippe, Head of Business Development at Biopôle Lausanne - Sandra Sulser, Chief Project Officer at Seerave Foundation and Co-founder and Partner of Arven Partners LLC - Nicolas Charton, Managing Director - E-CUBE  Strategy Consultants SA, Lausanne office. At the end, the audience choose their favourite pitches as well.

And the winners are:

  • Best startup: NeuroSoft. They received 3’500 CHF in non-dilutive funding. Neurosoft developed a new technology to produce soft electrical interfaces with the brain and spinal cord. The mechanical compliance of the implants is similar to the one of neural tissues, whereas current clinical devices are much more rigid. This results in more stable interfaces, higher specificity of stimulation targets and higher signal quality while recording.
  • Best healthcare startup: NeuroSoft. The company will now enter the global mentoring program of IMAGINE IF! And have 2 free-tickets for the Health Horizons conference, to be held in Cambridge UK the 26th-27th of June where the IMAGINE IF! Global finals will also take place. Innovation Forum Lausanne will cover travel and housing expenses.
  • Audience prize: tie between NeuroSoft and Swoxid. Swoxid is an innovative air/water purifier that filters and sterilizes air/water with natural sunlight or a UV lamp (possibly UV LEDs activated by a solar panel). Both companies will be interviewed in the following weeks by the Innovation Forum Lausanne to become the innovators of the months for April and May. The interviews will be published on the Innovation Forum website.
  • StartLab prize: 3-months desk in Startlab at Biopôle was given to SenSwiss. To enable patient-specific administration of drugs, SenSwiss is developing a point-of-care device to measure plasma drug concentrations in a single drop of patient’s blood in 3 minutes. The detection method can be easily adapted to several drugs requiring accurate monitoring and close supervision.This prize was chosen personally by Olivier Philippe who was representing the vibrant Lausanne life science community in the jury.
  • Best cleantech startup: hiLyte. HiLyte-Power aims at providing cheap clean energy for people who still use kerosene for lighting. The hiLyte battery produces enough power to both charge a phone and give light to a room for one night. The startup now has the possibility to go for one month to swissnex in San Francisco. Innovation Forum will partially cover travel and housing expenses.
(ES)

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