FASHWELL wins START Award at Start Summit

At a two day conference the evening of the second day is usually the time when the participants start to leave. This was different at the START Summit. On Saturday evening the Aula of the University of St. Gallen was still crowded. The reason was the pitching competition of five selected start-ups.

The selected companies:

Everycook is an innovative cooking device that takes in raw food and processes it into a finished meal. The intelligent device connects to an online recipe database to provide the user with a large choice of meal options and it links to his smartphone to guide him through all process steps that require manual action (shopping, adding ingredients etc.).

PLVfashion is an online platform for buying and selling used clothes. Users can sell their clothing for a fee themselves or may use a so called concierge service. The platform which is backed by serial entrepreneur Peter Schüpbach is focussing on Switzerland.

Sanovation has developed the digital pain diary CatchMyPain. The jury was impressed by the strong growth of the company - CatchMyPain has 1200 new users every week – and the global reach: most of the CatchMyPain users are from the US.

Soundcake is a start-up from Munich and developing a simple box that broadcasts a livestream of the music which is playing in any club or bar that supports Soundcake. While listening to the stream, users can get some information on location, opening hours, prices or special events and so choose a club that suits their needs.

The winner of the competition is FASHWELL:

FASHWELL is a spin-off of ETH Zurich and closing the gap between seeing a product and finding a product in an online shop. With the app users take pictures of pieces of clothing. The intelligent software then finds similar articles in online shops. The company is still in a very early stage and looking for seed funding.

The jury was impressed by the pitch but even more by a live demo of the prototype that really worked. Matthias Danone, co-founder of FASHWELL, took a picture of the shirt of jury president Florian Schweitzer and a few seconds later, the app showed a list with similar shirts that can be bought at several online shops.

The prize that was awarded for the first time at a START Summit is worth CHF10’000. In addition FASHWELL received a wild card for the Axel Springer Plug & Play Accelerator programme.