Welcome to reality

Dear reader

Hack the City 2018 was advertised as a normal hackathon and more than 100 developers got down to work. In the end, three teams stood on the podium in Lugano and all are working with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This example shows that neural networks and machine learning have left the protected environment of higher education institutions and arrived in the economy. In addition, some news from the last week.

Baloise insurance company has chosen an AI marketing solution from Zug start-up Veezoo. Of the 10 companies that venture leaders is taking to China, two deal with AI-based data analysis. Two Glarus hydropower plants are equipping their facilities with an Industrie 4.0 solution based on self-learning algorithms, and Zurich AI pioneer Starmind completed a USD 15 million financing round. Incidentally, this was the second major financing of last week: on Wednesday, biotech company Memo Therapeutics announced that it had raised CHF 5 million in a Series A2 financing round.

The concept of Artificial Intelligence has been discussed since the 1950s. Although blockchain technology is much younger, it also electrifies start-ups and investors alike. For example, a new investment vehicle has been launched in Zug under the name Blockchain Valley Ventures (BVV); the initiators come from the Crypto Valley Association sphere.

BVV has not yet made any investments, in contrast to Swisscom Ventures, which recently participated in blockchain start-up Metaco. Read our interview with Johannes Hoehener, Swisscom’s fintech expert.

Looking ahead, the registration deadline for BaselArea’s BaseLaunch programme expires next Monday. And the day after, the business plan competition >>venture>> says: meet the supporters in Zurich! Ritah Ayebare Nyakato and Sophie Küsterling from startupticker will also be there.

Have a good weekend.

Jost Dubacher
Editor startupticker.ch