Traceability startup impresses Philip Morris International and Mission Winnow

PM Equity Partner, the Corporate Venture Capital Fund of PMI, partnered with MassChallenge Switzerland and Mission Winnow to create the second edition of the Swiss PMEP Startup Challenge, which took place on the 12th September 2019 in the operations center of Philip Morris International in Lausanne. Last year’s winner was EPFL Innovation Park based Nagi Bioscience. 

This year,  80+ Startups from the 2019 cohort of MassChallenge were asked to apply for the competition by sending in a one pager teaser describing their startup as well as touching on how they could be of strategic value to PMI and contribute to the vision for a smoke free future. 10 finalists were then selected to come and pitch to a jury made up of PMI’s Senior Management on potential innovative solutions in the fields of Digital, Life sciences, Operations and Sustainability. 

• uFraction8 (GB)
• KaiosID (CH)
• Enterprise Bots (CH)
• Microcap (CH)
• Pack neutral (CH – Corporate initiative from Nestle in Vevey)
• Plair (CH)
• PXLVision (CH)
• SDCMed (UK)
• Swistor (CH)
• Wattron (DE) 

The startups were given 5 minutes each to present their business model followed by 5 minutes Q&A session. The event was open to all employees of PMI and various potential business sponsors (spanning from R&D, Life Sciences, Digital, Illicit Trade, Sustainability, Operations) were present during the event, creating potential commercial collaboration opportunities for the startups with PMI. Out of last year’s event, 3 startups are still running pilot projects with PMI, which could lead to larger commercial collaborations. 

KaiosID takes Mission Winnow Prize

This year’s first prize went to Ufraction8 who won a cash prize of CHF10’000. The Great Britain venture provides microfluidics-based filtration systems which enable scalable, low energy, liquid- particle separation. This solution could be of interest for the PMI Research and Development team in the CUBE Neuchâtel. 

The second winner was KaiosID. The Swiss startup won a non-cash prize offered by the Mission Winnow collaboration, taking the online and public vote during the event. KaiosID has created an innovative cloud based traceability solution that adds unique, invisible and hidden random patterns on the products packaging. This solution could help tackle the considerable illicit trade that exists today in various industries, including the tobacco industry. The Vaud startup was invited for the weekend to Maranello to take part in a Ferrari driving experience as well as to visit the Ferrari factory and museum.

Mission Winnow is a PMI-driven initiative to demonstrate their commitment to continuous innovation and development of new solutions that can expedite positive change for society.

Collaborating and working on the future

Speaking of the ongoing collaborations with Swiss startups, Nagi Bioscience is currently running a commercial pilot with the life sciences team of PMI. The leading Tobacco Company also is exploring collaborations with other MassChallenge Switzerland startups such as Scailyte. “From this year’s event, so far KaiosID, Enterprise Bot, Ufraction8 & SDCmed are having preliminary discussions internally.” further explains Dean Haworth, who organized the competition.

In the future, Philip Morris intends to raise awareness with its partners around its innovation initiatives and include other VC funds, startups that may contact them directly as well as other members from the Investment community.

(ES)