Swisscom StartUp Challenge Brings Out Innovation in AI, Cloud, Robotics

CREAL3D, PXL Vision, People-Analytix AG, DeepCode and Gmelius are the winners of the seventh Swisscom StartUp Challenge. All gave a successful pitch to the panel at the Swisscom Braingym in Bern. They will now travel to Silicon Valley for a specially tailored one-week Business Acceleration Programme.

Since the launch of the Swisscom StartUp Challenge in 2013, over 1,140 start-ups have applied to take part. This year, the challenge attracted entries from 289 start-ups – a new record.

69% of the entrants were from German-speaking Switzerland, 26% from French-speaking Switzerland and 5% from Italian-speaking Switzerland. They come from such diverse fields as Artificial Intelligence, ICT / Cloud Services, IoT / Robotics and FinTech / Crypto Finance, Blockchain, Digital Marketing, Drones and Cyber Security.

The top ten pitched to the panel of experts, comprising Roger Wüthrich-Hasenböhler (Chief Digital Officer, Swisscom), Christoph Aeschlimann (Head of Network and IT at Swisscom), Stefan Kuentz (Swisscom Ventures), Nanja Strecker (Managing Director at esabic) and Beat Schillig (CEO of programme partner venturelab).

The start-ups not only needed smart ideas and a convincing business model to impress the panel, they also had to show team spirit and determination. The panel were particularly impressed by the following start-ups: CREAL3D, PXL Vision, People-Analytix AG, DeepCode and Gmelius.

Mentoring with the world’s best

The winners have all secured a place on the Business Acceleration programme in Silicon Valley, a tailored mentoring programme organised by the Swisscom outpost. The programme allows the start-ups to put their business model through its paces and make valuable contacts with top international entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The start-ups will set out on their journey on 26 October 2019.

Roger Wüthrich-Hasenböhler: “I have been truly impressed by the ambition and drive of these start-up companies! I am already looking forward to opening doors for them in Silicon Valley. Contacts with international partners and mentors will get them off to a great start and help them unleash their innovative energy in Switzerland.”

Short profiles on the winners

CREAL3D is developing the future display of virtual and mixed-reality headsets and smart glasses. Our near-eye light-field projector creates hologram-like images with true optical depth, eliminating the eyestrain and nausea often caused by today’s devices, enhancing immersion, extending comfortable usage time and allowing conflict-less mixing of virtual and real worlds.

www.creal3d.com

PXL Vision is a Swiss high-tech startup providing Daego®, a scalable software platform for the secure verification of digital identities, based on computer vision machine learning. Daego® provides maximum security with full automation and is helping companies to reduce fraud, lower the cost of customer onboarding and maximise sales conversion rates. PXL’s customers include Sunrise and SwissSign with the SwissID, among others.

www.pxl-vision.com

People-Analytix AG combines a unique database, artificial intelligence and analytical forecasting methods to provide individuals and organisations with virtual career advice, skills gap analysis and relevant labour market trends. People-Analytix is making an important contribution to overcoming the upcoming challenges in today’s working world. The Zurich-based company was founded in Dec 2017.

www.people-analytix.com

DeepCode is the platform for AI-powered code reviews. VC-backed ETH spin-off DeepCode brings the knowledge of the global development community to every software developer. The bot uses machine learning to process millions of commits in software projects and learns how to find many more critical bugs/vulnerabilities in your code than other tools.

www.deepcode.ai

Gmelius transforms Gmail in your company’s workspace. Your inbox becomes a work hub for communication, collaboration and workflow automation with real-time syncing across all team members and devices, web & mobile. Gmelius is already trusted by more than 50k teams to manage customers and project pipelines from beginning to end.

www.gmelius.com