The AIT Brazil, Colombia and India startups revealed

This year, three AIT programs have been organized. For the AIT Brazil the selected teams will travel to a training camp in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in November 2019, followed by a one-week training camp in Switzerland, scheduled in April 2020. The second camp is AIT Colombia in which the teams will participate in a one-week training camp starting in Switzerland in October 2019 followed by a one-week camp in Bogotá and Medellín in Colombia in February 2020. The AIT programs for Brazil and Colombia are organized by the Centro Latinoamericano - Suizo at the University of St. Gallen. Swissnex Brazil is among the partners.

AIT India
In September, ten entreprenuers from the fields of Medtech, Biotech, Cleantech, Hightech or Material will travel to Bangalore, India. The program will continue for a second phase in the winter of 2020. The team will be joined by their Indian counterparts in Switzerland for an advanced entrepreneurship week. The Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) has mandated ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences to execute the AIT programme. Venturelab and swissnex India are key programme partners. They organize and facilitate a full day preparation kick-off event in Switzerland, a week in India followed by a week in Switzerland including workshops, industry visits and business meetings. 

Through the camps, teams are exposed to selected markets in addition to offering training to help them transform high-level applied research into market applications. The main objectives of the program include helping participants to advance business plans, establish contacts with the industry, clarify intellectual property issues, network at an international level, and foster new partnerships and collaborations.

The selected AIT teams in their designated programs are;

AIT Brazil

Rea: Loulia Kasem and Erick Garcia, EPFL – developed the first non-invasive test for pregnant women to diagnose the risk of preterm birth whenever and wherever they want.

Decentriq: Nikolas Molyndris, HSG – the company enables companies to do analytics on sensitive data without breaching any privacy.

EraCal Therapeutic: Simon Breitler, UZH & Havard University – is working on overcoming the metabolic syndrome by bringing their new anti-obesity drug to patients worldwide.

Depoly: Samantha Lynn Anderson, EPFL – chemically recycle PET plastic back to its main chemical components.

Legendiary Foods: Raffael Wohlgensinger, HSG – leverages new approaches in biotechnology and food science to produce real milk products without cows to improve the sustainability of our food system.

Nebulo Systems: Hana Samet, EPFL – aims to revolutionize the home security system, by bringing the super effective fog technology to the masses.

Nanoglue: Sabastian Loy, ETH Zurich & Empa St. Gallen – developed a cutting-edge nanotechnology to ensure skin transplant survival for millions of patients worldwide.

Planted: Pascal Bieri, HSG – creates tasty ‘meat’ directly and only from plants - and skips the animal in its process. Our plant-based meat is all-natural, sustainable, high in protein, healthy and cruelty-free.

Annaida Technologies: Gaurasundar Marc Conley, EPFL – develops high tech solutions to tackle the problem of low success rates in In Vitro Fertilization.

AIT Colombia

MoSan: Mona Chirie Mijthab, ZHdK – A transportable dry toilet and ecological sanitation service for densely populated settlements and challenging environments worldwide.

Rigi Tech: David Rovira Gurrera, EPFL – a pioneering drone technology company developing next-generation logistics vehicles for faster, easier and eco-friendly deliveries, enabling universal access to goods to communities, governments and private businesses.

Agrosustain: Florian Guignard, Agroscope & Université de Lausanne (UNIL) – develops and brings to market natural solutions to stop and prevent the development of molds on agronomically important crops in post-harvest.

Fenx: Enrico Scoccimarro, ETH Zurich - transforms mineral waste into high-performance, safe and sustainable insulation foams for the building industry.

MeduSoil: Dimitrios Terzis, EPFL – the EPFL spin-off and applies the world's first ground bio-stabilization technology to mineralize carbonate binder underground.

Yasai: Mark Essam Zahran, ETH Zurich – designs, builds and operates Vertical Farms all around the world: Grow more with less.

Gilytics: Philippe Bieri, ETH Zurich – is committed to provide a fast computing and 3D visualization technology for complex planning of transportation and energy infrastructures and to increase the public participation and social acceptance between public authorities and local communities involved in a project.

Dronistics: Sebastian Fifanski, EPFL – enables companies to scale safe & reliable last-mile drone delivery services.

AIT India

Adiposs: Andrej Babic, UNIGE – is  developing new diagnostic methods and agents for medical use.

C –MedTec: Hana Samet, EPFL –  designs a monitoring and diagnosis helmet helping sport practitioners to behave in a healthy way in case of brain concussion.

CocoBoard: Michail Kyriazopoulos, BFH –  is a pioneering coconut-based fiberboard made of coconut husk bonded with natural tannin extracts, designed in Switzerland and manufactured in the Philippines. Cocoboards introduce an innovative low-tech process to transform agroforestry residues into bio-based materials, using only locally available natural resources.

Emuna: Morgan Hunter, ETH – Emuna’s goal is to establish a spin-off out of the lab of Prof. Dr. Cornelia Halin Winter and to use this research base to fuel the development of therapeutics that target immune cell migration. Emuna plans to make use of an outsourced/partnership driven strategy in order to advance key research findings into clinically affirmed therapeutics.

Hi-D Imaging: Ozge Karakas, ETH – provides a novel tailored heart valve selection tool to cardiologists before the heart valve replacement operation of each individual patient. Implementation of this service into hospitals will play a key role in selecting a patient-specific heart valve with an optimal flow.

Magnes: Olgac Ergeneman, ETH – Measuring forces is key for effective rehabilitation and fast recovery especially for orthopaedic or neurological diseases or injuries of the lower extremities. Magnes developed a magnetic multi-axis force-sensing technology. This technology will disrupt the rehabilitation field by measuring the strength and progress of rehabilitation patients.

RisKlick: Poorya Amini, UNIBE – Clinical trials (CTs) are used to determine whether an experimental treatment works well and safe so that it can obtain market authorization. They are the longest and costliest part of drug development. Over 90% of CTs fail; imposing financial burden to companies and exposing volunteers to risk.

Three startups in the AIT India program are participating in the AIT Brazil and Colombia; they include Nanoglue represented by Tino Matter, REA represented by Erick Antonio Garcia Cordero and FenX represented by Michele Zanini.

(RAN)

photo: Unsplash