Silicon Valley and Munich got a visit from nine startups teams from Stockholm this fall. This is what the participants in the KTH Innovation Brighter program bring with them back to Sweden.
“For me, the biggest transition was in my mindset, says Andrea Volpato, one of the founders of Rizer Biotech. I'm a researcher but I can also do this. It was a spark.”
Visiting UC Berkeley Campus.
Andrea Volpato has just returned from Silicon Valley, where he spent one week immersing in the local innovation ecosystem in the KTH Innovation Brighter Program. Five teams founded at KTH joined the Silicon Valley leg of the program, which prepares them for a future expansion into a new market by growing their networks and facilitating meaningful connections with the local ecosystem. During five intense days, the teams met with investors and legal advisors, toured labs at Stanford and Berkeley, met with KTH alumni, local founders and visited famous innovation hubs, like Plug and Play.
"The investor lunch was very good, says David Unnersjö, one of the founders of Magnephy, a KTH-spinoff developing “the future of kidney imaging”. We got to pitch for investors in a very relaxed environment, got feedback and just exposed ourselves to this experience."
Earlier this fall, five other teams in the Brighter program traveled to Munich. Based at the co-working space Werk1, they ventured out into Munich to meet with organizations like BMW Startup Garage, BMW Ventures and 27Pilots, met local founders over breakfast, visited UnternehmerTUM, and had workshops on sales and pitching.
Alessandro Prencipe and Halvor Fergestad, two of the founders of Linpha.
"Being in Germany opened our eyes with respect to where we stand in comparison with some European competitors, . We tend to focus a lot on the technical part of our solution, but now we feel motivated to develop the business side of things, says Alessandro Prencipe, one of the founders of Linpha, that develops components for next-generation photonic integrated chips."
New for this year was a collaboration with the Grosshandelssocieteten foundation within Stockholm's Borgerskap. The foundation offered travel scholarships for the teams that travelled to Silicon Valley, with the aim to create opportunities for more teams to test their ideas on the global market.
"It’s great to hear that the travel scholarships made a difference to the participants, says Anna Wallin-Krasse, board member of the Grosshandelssocieteten foundation. They seem to have taken part in an intense and varied program, which is impressive!"
The teams in the Brighter Program
Akira Science
Silicon Valley
Akira Science's mission is to remove the negative side effects of breast cancer surgery by providing a new solution to regenerate breast tissue in situ. Akira's team has developed a degradable polymer compatible with existing 3D-printing technologies. By fostering natural breast regeneration, they will help healthcare organizations save resources and reduce the physical and mental pain of patients with breast cancer.
FLOX Robotics reimagines landscapes where humans and wildlife thrive together. Transforming human-wildlife conflicts into coexistence, they design, develop and deploy autonomous cutting-edge technologies for Wildlife management as a Service (WMaaS) to keep wild animals away from areas where they are not supposed to be.
Founded by researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Karolinska Institutet and University of Cologne, Magnephy analyzes kidney pathology at the nano-scale with 3D microscopy. Their microscopy service uses AI analysis for fast, automated, and quantitative 3D kidney pathology at the nano-scale to improve pharmaceutical development and diagnostics.
Rizer Biotech develops a novel measurement technique called STARSS, which is able to study interactions between important biomolecules inside living cells. With their new technology, they aim to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry and research methodology, address global problems such as antibiotic resistance as well as to contribute to the development of new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and other life-threatening conditions.
Scaleup Robotics enable their customers to access an online learning and experimentation platform that allows everyone to control and program real robot arms over the internet using a robotics-as-a-service approach. Their infrastructure allows for exploration, research and training of the next generation of knowledgeable citizens to navigate and shape the current technological transformation towards an AI and robotics-driven society.
Fleetm8 develops intelligent solutions that bridge ports, ships and people through streamlined communication. Their digital ecosystem is tailored for the maritime industry and transforms daily routines into valuable analytics. Communicating reliability and performance has never been easier.
Based on decades worth of world leading KTH research into nano structuring of lithium-niobite, Linpha develops components for next-generation photonic integrated chips. Their technology promises to speed up fiber optical communication while at the same time saving massive amounts of energy compared to the current state of the art. This matters, since IP traffic represents one percent of the global energy consumption. Linpha’s long term goal is to build a full supply chain for this technology in Europe and to enable widespread and affordable deployment of photonics solutions in ultracompact and ruggedized LN chip formats for coherent ultrafast signal processing.
Lynxwork
Munich
Lynxwork unifies your management system, software tools, and data models for quick, reliable access to the information at the source. With Lynxwork, you can enjoy aligned processes, consistent data, and real-time monitoring. Simplified connector creation enhances data integrity.
Southern Lights is a Swedish climate startup doing B2B SaaS to accelerate green hydrogen development by helping energy companies increase productivity and competitiveness while de-risking their projects and reducing costs and time in their development. They digitize engineering design, project optimization and otherwise expensive consultancies and human hours in an exponentially growing billion-dollar industry urgently needed to decarbonize the global economy.
