Multiple winners at Startup Nights

The Entrepreneur Club Winterthur had another fruitful Startup Nights event, with a total of 9,000 visitors attending over the course of two days. The event featured 200 booths from startups and supporters to showcase their solutions and offers and over 3,000 matchmaking meetings, providing opportunities for networking and partnership development. The event also hosted 60 workshops and featured 100 speakers, offering attendees knowledge and insights. The organisers were particularly impressed by the positive feedback received from different participants, including founders, investors, corporates, academia, and general visitors.

One of the event's highlights was the award ceremony to recognise and celebrate the outstanding entrepreneurs shaping the Swiss startup scene. Out of more than 120 received applications, 12 startups received an invitation to pitch to the audience. 

The Pre-seed award category chose three winners:

The first prize of CHF 5,000, sponsored by Entrepreneur Club Winterthur, went to S.Lab, bringing the startup its second prize. Zario, the Ticino-based startup offering a digital well-being platform that helps people replace mindless scrolling time with healthy habits, scored second place, winning a cash prize of CHF 3,000, sponsored by zünder accelerator. The third-place prize of CHF 2,000, sponsored by ZHAW Alumni SML, was bestowed onto CheckEye, which develops a cloud-based solution to detect diabetic retinopathy using photographic images of eye fundus through the ML\AI algorithm.

In the Seed category, sponsored by the Gebert Rüf Stiftung, the winners were:

Tresio, which took home a CHF 5,000 cheque sponsored by, offers small and medium-sized enterprises a cloud-based platform that offers a 360-degree financial view of their finances, enabling them to make agile, informed decisions.

Emost secured second place for its smart plug-and-play battery storage systems used for flexible and environmentally friendly power supply on construction sites, events, in emergencies, for charging e-cars or as a replacement for diesel generators. The startup received CHF 3,000.

Kuori, which creates circular materials by upcycling food byproducts like banana peels and nutshells, was awarded CHF 2,000 in the third place.

Additional prizes included Wildcards for Powerpitch, zünder, and Launch Control, as well as vouchers from Swiss ventures and Kada Solutions.

The inaugural Youth Prize, chosen by 120 students from Kantonsschule Büelrain, was awarded to S.Lab, the startup developing fully decomposable packaging. This award category offers a symbolic Award Check.

(PR)