It is official: Out of 95 business plans and 107 business ideas submitted, the >>venture>> jury and advisory board members chose CUTISS as the best business plan and Prognostics as the best business idea project.
The top 5 ranked startups of each category and jury members on one picture. (Pic: >>venture>>)
1st place – best business plan: CUTISS (UNI Zürich) Deep skin wounds heal badly, developing into debilitating, permanent, disfiguring scars that require intense medical and home care. CUTISS now offers individually customized, minimally scarring skin grafts bio-engineered from a small piece of the patient’s skin.
1st place – best business idea: Pregnostics (ETHZ) is developing a diagnostic tool that measures the cervical stiffness in pregnant women. Monitoring cervical stiffness allows to identify women at risk of preterm birth, thus solving the problem of preterm birth risk assessment in pregnancy.
The >>venture>> Alumni on one stage, who now are successful entrepreneurs around the world. (pic: >>venture>>)
It was the 10th edition of >>venture>>. Therefore the organizers released a book with all the great success stories of the past. A few alumni – for example Julian Bertschinger (Covagen) or Daniel Frei (Tibits), who sold their companies for a lot of money after winning this award, – attended the event.
2nd-5th place business plan
2nd: Zurimed (ETHZ) Knee ligament injuries are among the most common and severe musculoskeletal traumas. ZuriMED is an innovative team specialized in orthopedic biomechanics and biomaterials that has developed a disruptive technology with potential to revolutionize anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. Co-Founder Xiang Li hasn’t been there because he is with the venture leaders programm organized by venturelab and swissnex Boston in the US.
3rd: Inositec (ETHZ) is a drug development project at the preclinical proof-of-concept stage with a small molecule for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infection, a bacterial infection of the colon that has become the most common health care associated infection.
4th: Gamaya (EPFL) provides an integrated solution for large-scale monitoring and diagnostics of crops for precision agriculture. Gamaya acquires imaging data using sensors mounted on drones, and translates the data into actionable information for farmers, such as optimum rates of application for fertilisers and crop protection chemicals, as well as early alerts for disease, pests and weeds.
5th: The microGauge project (ETHZ) aims to develop and commercialize next-generation pressure sensors for industrial vacuum coating systems. The proposed high precision, full range sensor offers means to replace up to four state of the art sensors with one single compact gauge.
2nd-5th place business idea
2nd: TapTools (ETHZ), a device developed for non-destructive testing. We believe that our product will be the next key technology in quality control testing. The novel technology goes beyond visual inspection and ensures comprehensive material characterization in a hundredth of a second. The co-founders attended the Startup Essentials Workshops this spring at ETH and get there his startup ready for success.
3rd: Sun bioscience (EPFL) is a biotech company that provides next generation cell culture platforms. They specialize on making three-dimensional organotypic cultures faster, more efficient and more reproducible in order to develop better and new drugs and to define their efficacy in a patient-specific manner. In the same night the startup won 100’000$ at the World Founder Forum in Stockholm.
4th: Sensetag (ETHZ) have developed a class of patent-pending, smart, inexpensive, ultrasmall DNA-based tracers able to measure a range of properties (temperature, oxidative stress, light, pH) in challenging commercial, industrial, research or clinical settings (e.g. deep underground, within live cells).
5th: FireHUD (EPFL) helps firemen to see through smoke and darkness by showing a thermal image overlay on an augmented reality mask. This increases their situational awareness and capacity to search for victims, therefore making their work safer and more efficient.
