Seventh Vanguard Accelerator startup is Perivision

Created in 2020, the Vanguard Accelerator aims to bridge the gap between breakthrough digital health solutions and patients. Speaking of the reasons that led to its creation, Biopôle’s Director of Innovation & Partnerships Pierre-Jean Wipff says: “We realized that despite the great offer in terms of training, mentoring and coaching programs, entrepreneurs were still lacking opportunities to collect feedback from the market and key actors in their respective value chain to refine their business assumptions (value proposition, business model, go-to-market, revenue streams…). Hence, the essence of the Vanguard Accelerator is to open Biopôle’s extended network to selected entrepreneurs in digital health to challenge and further consolidate their business cases.

The Accelerator is open to any digital health companies at the stage of an MVP no matter their geographic origin. However, startups are required to be present for the 6-month Vanguard acceleration period. It is also important that they interact, and develop connections and collaborations with other Biopôle members, ideally on the long term. Three to four startup calls are published per year on the website.

Perivision will be the 7^th startup of the accelerator. The six other companies are:

• Gabi Smartcare (Belgium): Improve global health from day 1 by objectively reporting children’s symptoms
• Impli (UK) : Implantable healthcare
• Xanastim (CH): Smart Neurostimulation for a better life
• Resilient (CH): Burnout prevention tool that develops resilient employees and organizations
• Biped (CH): The smartest pedestrian copilot
• Sensemodi (CH): In-motion knee diagnostics

Preventing blindness caused by glaucoma
Glaucoma, a chronic eye disease that leads to blindness, affects over 80 million people worldwide; however, a significant percentage of these people are not diagnosed o due to a lack of specialised eye care infrastructure or timely doctor’s appointments. Based on research at the Inselspital and the University of Bern and supported by the vision of reimagining eye care and eye testing, the medical AI & software startup and spinoff of the ARTORG Center developed a portable, fast, easy-to-use Virtual Reality perimeter and supported by visual field testing software to measure glaucoma progression. Perimetry or visual field testing is used to diagnose and monitor glaucoma patients and is currently a bottleneck for practices and hospitals. “In the long-term, we will build an entire platform of different functional eye tests and AI tools to support clinicians in their daily work”, says Patrick Kessel, CEO of Perivision.

Ahead of its market entry in the US at the end of 2023, many private practices and hospitals have already approached the team to purchase or conduct studies on the device. The startup has also received letters of intent to buy the product from various ophthalmology practices, where it has demonstrated its prototype and explained the vision. Perivision obtained EUR 1.5M seed financing from EIT Health Wild Card accelerator last year, a convertible loan from Venture Kick and a sizeable research grant from the Swiss government to conduct clinical studies with our technology. Today the company employs four people, with more yet to join in the coming months.

(ES/RAN)