Recruiting, Virtual Reality and Fresh air in a bottle

Three startups in the second batch at the Swiss Startup Factory have successfully completed the acceleration process: Joineer, Pure Swiss Air and WeaVr. Each pitched their business ideas before potential investors, partners and the audience and presented their achievements from the last three months. Registration for the next batch has already started.

On Friday evening at the Demo Day, the Swiss startup Factory in collaboration with its partner Goldbach brought together over 200 guests including investors, entrepreneurs and like-minded individuals in Küssnacht to witness the closing of second acceleration program.

Three graduated from the Swiss startup factory
In September 2016 eight startups were selected to join the Swiss startup factory and the Goldbach acceleration program. In a three months program deigned to prepare, shape and bring these startups to the next level, startups received continued support, intensive pitch training and various training programs to enable them advance their business ideas.

Only three startups – Joineer, Pure Swiss Air and WeaVr – successfully complete the program and have also accomplished significant milestones along the way.  

Joineer – the startup has developed a match making platform for employers and employees. Both the recruiter and applicant fill in the provided questionnaire designed to determine a best match. The questionnaire not only focuses on hard but also on soft skills, such as social orientation, personal strengths, team culture and other values important to job-seeker and employer alike, to allow for effective and real-time matchmaking. This process reduces the amount of time companies spend on screening applications and delivers them the most suitable candidate. David Wartmann, co-founder of Joineer told startupticker that they are planning to launch early 2017.

Pure Swiss Air –The startup provides compressed fresh air from the Jungfraujoch in a portable bottle allow users to acquire fresh air at all times. Pure Swiss Air (PSA), takes on a B2B-B2C strategy, but is currently focusing on B2B. It aims to supply its products in Shanghai, Beijing and New Delhi, which are one of the highly populated areas in the world.  “We are happy to have joined the Swiss startup factory. We have learned how to create a business model and how to make it happen.  We worked hard and have been able to achieve three major milestones; we signed a partnership with the Jungfraubahn who are also our main supporters. We use their whole network and infrastructure in order to capture the clean air from the top of the Jungfraujoch and fill it into our bottles and we also have a license to use the original Jungfrau-Brand. We also recently started collaboration with Heidi.com,  a Swiss manufacturing company specialising in ready-to-wear fashion for adult men and women. Together we are going to develop a new Air product which will be sold as a souvenir in over 350 places in Switzerland. Furthermore,  we have sold 4100 bottles since June 2016”, says Leidenberger Konstantin and Valeria Bianchiand Joris Verweij, co-founders of Pure Swiss Air.

WeaVr– right at the beginning of the program Weavr was backed by the Goldbach. The startup has developed a platform that generates virtual reality Stories based on users’ own photos and videos available on their social media channels. Weavr uses machine learning algorithms to caption image contents and suggest similar content to expand user experience.  “We have created a community which we listen to and understand. In return, we guide them in creating their stories and use their feedback to improve our services. Consequently, we add a new dimension to the virtual world of social media by transforming their photos and videos into virtual experiences”, says Miguel Rodriguez, founder and CEO of WeaVr.

WeaVr has equally achieved significant milestones during the three months.  Since December 2nd, the startup is active on the market and is available for HTC Vive, Samsung gear and Oculus Rift. In addition, WeaVr received a US $360K grant in Azure resources as part of the BizSpark plus and will also receive additional investment of CHF 20K. Two customers including Goldbach have already been signed to get the company going and three others are in the pipeline. "With WeaVR, we have found a start-up that fits Goldbach “, elaborates Michi Frank, CEO of Goldbach.

In culmination of the event, startups of the first batch – Carhelper, Beaconsmind, Struckd and Velohub – were invited for a panel discussion. Each of these is currently active in their respecetive market and has also achieved a degree of success.  Carhelper and Beaconsmind have closed financing rounds. Struckd has signed international collaborations in New York and Velohub expanded to Munich Germany.

The Swiss Startup Factory is currently accepting applications for the next batch which will start in February 2017.

WeaVr team

Joineer Team
Joineer Team

Pure Swiss Air team