Each year, Kickstart has been able to attract startups from all over the world to apply for its 11-week accelerator program, which focuses on fostering partnerships between corporates and startups. To this day, the program has supported over 450 startups and facilitated over 310 business deals (see Collaboration Map) in the form of pilot and commercial projects. For this 9th edition, more than 170 experts evaluated and selected 41 startups from nine countries, giving them access to decision-makers and stakeholders to test and scale their business models and close promising deals in the Verticals New Work & Learning, Finance & Insurance, Food & Retail, Health & Wellbeing and Smart Cities. The new deals and partnerships will be announced at a closing ceremony on 28 November at the Kraftwerk in Zurich.
Over a third of the participants (12) in the current edition hail from Switzerland. These are:
New Work & Learning
Wyrd.io – is an easy-to-use solution for strength-based team development.
Moodtalk – offers a data-driven team development software that makes team development become measurable thanks to real-time data. The startup empowers over 3’000 users in 50 organizations, such as CSS, Axpo, or PDAG.
Further contestants in this category are: Hapster (France), Saliha (Netherlands), and Interloom (Germany).
Finance & Insurance
Neur.On – Is developing an AI translation platform providing industry-customized solutions to legal professionals, corporations, and governments worldwide. The platform offers simple and efficient but also unparalleled in accuracy and reliability.
Hypt – the Bern based startup empowers companies to measure and scale personal recommendations to boost their revenue while generating customer insights on a daily basis.
Enterprise Bot – specializes in conversational AI and process automation solutions for businesses, helping them enhance customer and employee support.
Further participants are: Multimodal (USA), Keyless (UK), Plumery (The Netherlands), Billogram (Sweden), Wequity (Belgium), YData (USA).
Food & Retail
ProSeed – offers breweries a hassle-free solution for transforming their by-products into food-grade raw materials, generating additional revenue while significantly reducing waste.
Upgrain – transforms brewers spent grain (BSG) into valuable raw materials to reduce resource inefficiency and food waste.
B'ZEOS – uses seaweed as a feedstock to create novel bio-based and fully home-compostable single-use packaging.
Nosh.bio from Germany was also selected in this vertical.
Health & Wellbeing
PlaynVoice – provides an AI solution that listens to and transcribes patient conversations, subsequently generating medical documentation. The solution saves therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists significant time by automating the documentation process, allowing them to focus more on patient care.
Alongside PlaynVoice are: AllyWell (Germany), Spixii (UK), Teale (France), Thryve (Germany) and Lifen (France).
Smart Cities
Solskin - specializes in integrating solar technology into building facades, enhancing energy efficiency through features like active solar tracking and AI-driven shading systems. The startup promises to increase photovoltaic (PV) energy production by up to 40% and reduce overall building energy consumption by as much as 80% in specific conditions.
irmos technologies – the ETH spinoff aims to maximize the safe operational life of existing buildings and bridges with sensor data and intelligent algorithms.
Zephr.xyz (USA), Over Easy Solar (Norway), Shayp (The Netherlands) and Thermosphr (Germany) are joining the two Swiss startups.
No Swiss startup has been selected in the category Climate Positive Mission - CE Initiative. Participants in this vertical are: Nature Coatings (USA), Made of Air (Germany), Biohm (UK), Lixea (Sweden).
In addition to the startups, Kickstart also offers intrapreneurship teams the chance to advance their solutions. Participants this year are: enerjoy, AI Buddy, Opineo, VidaSense, Visenco, Protonica and Watchibia.
(Press release/RAN)