Two Swiss startups join Y Combinator

This week’s 34th Y Combinator Demo Day featured founders from 42 countries and over 400 startups building in every sector, from fintech, B2B SaaS, Web3, consumer, healthcare, education, climate, energy, and more. Among them, two promising Swiss startups made their way.

Extreme-bandwidth data transmission enabled by light

Based at EPFL Innovation Park, Enlightra develops lasers for data centers. Their Microcomb based technology is 100 times faster and 10x more energy efficient than current solutions. Data centers use lasers to transmit information. They currently use single-color lasers, which cannot meet the demands for higher speeds and lower power consumption.
Founded by Maxim Karpov and John Jost, the Swiss Deeptech developed the multi-color lasers that solve this bottleneck for the 10 Billon dollar data center market. Enlightra is a spin-off from EPFL, and has a team of 4 PhDs with more than 50 years of R&D experience.

Preventing solar plant downtime disruptions

Swiss Cleantech SmartHelio provides software that helps solar utilities automatically predict and prevent downtime disruptions, increasing their annual revenue by USD 10k per MW per year from their solar plants. With the rising concerns of climate change, innovative cleantech solutions are emerging rapidly across the globe. This growth is supported by investors who have invested USD 775 Bn in cleantech startups in 2021 and it is growing at 27% YoY. “It is not only critical to replace fossil fuels but it is also important to make the current and future cleantech infrastructures truly sustainable.” says Govinda Upadhayay, CEO and Founder of SmartHelio.

So far, more than 3,000 companies have been funded by Y Combinator like Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Reddit, Stripe to name a few. Many of these companies are now Unicorns.

(ES)
Photo top: Enlightra team. Photo in text: SmartHelio team