Making the built environment more sustainable

The Innosuisse Certificate confirms that start-ups are ready for sustainable growth. It can be requested at the end of the Innosuisse Core Coaching. Four cleantech start-ups have been awarded with the Certificate recently:

Cowa - Smart heat storage
Heat pumps are often powered by electricity from photovoltaic systems on the roof of the house - but only during the day. Thanks to the heat storage units from cowa, heating systems can also draw on the self-produced energy at night. For this, the storage tanks are heated during the day by a heat pump using excess PV electricity and release the heat again at night. The cowa ENHANCED heating storage tank contains capsules filled with environmentally friendly salts as a phase change material. A storage tank filled with capsules can absorb around three times more energy than a conventional water storage tank.

The system has been available on the market since April 2022. After a financing round in the same year, the company is on course towards scaling up.

Droople – Smart Water Monitoring Solutions
Combining artificial intelligence and a full IoT solution, Droople enables customers to measure, monitor and analyze their water processes while predicting maintenance and efficiently saving water and energy for example by better matching supply and demand or discovering leakages. In addition, Droople's water intelligence platform digitizes water-based assets "off the radar" and provides customers real-time access to actionable data, bringing transparency, and optimizing their water and energy use. 

Internationally spread across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia, Droople's growing customer base includes water treatment manufacturers, hospitality service providers, distributors, and facility managers.

Fenx – sustainable insulating foams
Fenx transforms mineral waste into high-performance and sustainable insulation for the building industry. Their technology enables them to use a vast selection of locally sourced, readily available mineral wastes and low-value natural material. With its foaming technology Fenx is able to produce foams with a tuneable degree of porosity. The ETH Zurich spin-off designs and produces panels, bricks as well as customizes parts. In autumn 2022 the insulation panels for the first pilot project have been produced and shipped.

Oxara - circular cementfree technology for sustainable construction
Oxara developed and patented a cement-free chemical mixture that turns excavation waste into eco-friendly building materials. These can be used to produce cement-free concrete, for walls, floors and cast elements and cement-free unfired bricks and blocks, for conventional masonry walls. The products allow for reusing the excavation material and construction waste, thus ensuring a high level of recyclability.

After several successful pilot projects Oxara launched first product this spring: Admixture and binder solutions for numerous concrete applications as well as cement-free admixture solutions for compressed earth blocks.

(Stefan Kyora)