MassChallenge Switzerland 2023 Winners shine in Lausanne

Hosted at the Casino de Montbenon in Lausanne, the 2023 MassChallenge Switzerland Awards Ceremony was attended by over 400 guests and simultaneously broadcast worldwide. The ceremony celebrated the 12 early-stage startups that won the MassChallenge Switzerland awards, sharing the CHF 400,000 equity-free cash prize among them, in recognition of their solutions to actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions or remove carbon. For the first time the LDC Climate Resilience Prize, a non-dilutive cash prize of CHF 100,000 was awarded this year.

MassChallenge Switzerland 2023 Early-Stage Startup Accelerator Program cash prizes winners are:

Diamond Prize – CHF 120,000

• Impossible Materials (Fribourg) – The deeptech provides businesses with plant-based formulation ingredients to enable them more safe and sustainable product formulations and working towards a circular economy; their first product is a cellulose white pigment.

Gold Prize Winners – CHF 30,000

• Perovskia Solar (Vaud) – The cleantech startup provides digitally printed customizable solar cells to OEMs to make everyday devices energy self-sufficient.
• REVOZONA (Ticino) – The Lugano based startup’s ozone gas technology cuts CO2 emissions and water usage by up to 90% during cellulose textile pretreatment.

Enabling entrepreneurs to be climate responsible

The ceremony was also the occasion to celebrate the community of experts who supported the 112 startups to launch, grow and scale their businesses during the four-month acceleration program, including the 494 independent judges and 587 mentors involved this year.

Matt Lashmar, Managing Director of MassChallenge Switzerland, said: “I would like to thank our experts and partners for generously giving their time and expertise to help our startups advance their projects. This help is reflected in the record result this year, with 58% of startups exceeding their ingoing accelerator objective. I would also like to recognize the support we gained across the ecosystem to enable our entrepreneurs to be “climate responsible. We hope this becomes the ‘new normal’ for accelerators, in collective pursuit of reduced emissions and benefits for society as a whole.”

Since launching in 2016, MassChallenge Switzerland has accelerated more than 720 startups who have raised over CHF 1.2Bn in funding and created 50,000+ jobs.

(PR - ES)