by Carolina Santos | Jul 24, 2018 | Startups
The third edition of Smart Open Lisboa has already selected the 14 startups that will work side by side with the partners. All of them have proven to be what Lisbon needs right now in terms of mobility after the 5-day bootcamp.
The selected startups are AppyParking (United Kingdom), AIPARK (Germany), CardioID Technologies (Portugal), e-floater (Germany), eccocar (Spain), Idatase (Germany), LifePoints (Canada), Meep App (Spain), MotionTag (Germany), Parkio (Portugal), Shotl (Spain), Third Space Auto (United Kingdom), Wall-i (Portugal) and Xesol Innovation (Spain).
Tiago Farias, President and CEO at Carris, said that “Carris is pretty excited with the results of the program so far, mainly due to the startup’s quality and because it is focused on mobility”.
The first phase as well as the pilots begins on September 16 and will last until November 15, when the “Demo Day” is happening. On that day the final results will be presented. It is important to mention that EVERY startup will end up with some kind of partnership for a near or distant future. That partnership can even be on a different city and another context. Proving that nowadays open innovation programs are way more than just the experience.
by Carolina Santos | Jul 23, 2018 | Startups
The energy sector is in constant change and it’s to be on the forefront of that change that EDP in partnership with Expresso launched their seventh edition of EDP Open Innovation and for the first year Beta-i is an acceleration partner.
This acceleration program is dedicated to the development of new business projects focused on technological innovation or business model innovation in the area of clean technologies in the energy sector. So, startups centered on Clean Energy, Smart Grids, Energy Storage, Digital Innovation and focused on Client Solutions, search no more, this is the program you’ve been waiting for.
On the course of the program you’ll be able to pitch to EDP, investors and the international community, turn your startup into a potential partner, accelerate your business experience, test your solution and even run a pilot with EDP.
The applications are now open and will close on September 10, 2018. Startups will then be evaluated by an international jury. An intense selection period follows to come out with a list of 10 startups. The acceleration phase will last two weeks ending with a Demo Day, with startups pitching in five minutes. The prize money? 50,000€.
It may look like you still have a lot of time to apply, but one month and a half flies. Don’t miss this opportunity.
by Carolina Santos | Jul 3, 2018 | Corporates, Investors, Startups
The first SingularityU Cascais Lisbon Chapter is happening on July 11 at IDEIAhub – Palácio Sotto Mayor. And what is this? Well, it’s an event to introduce the community to Singularity’s view and mission and to introduce people to an exponential mindset. More than that, this Chapter leads the road to SingularityU Portugal Summit Cascais, on October 8 and 9, 2018. A summit organized by Beta-i, Cascais Municipality, and Nova SBE, with the support of the founding partners Ageas, Galp and Semapa, to debate and create the future.
These Chapters – this is just the first one – have the goal to to educate, empower and inspire leaders through 4 core areas:
- Connection: Creating and facilitating an engaged local community
- Events: Facilitating events about exponential technologies and global grand challenges
- Innovation: Sharing information about local innovations with the SU community
- Impact: Focusing on impact in collaboration with Singularity University
It’s no secret: the world’s changing, whether we like it or not, due to technologies such as AI, Blockchain, 3D Printing or VR and we need to be ahead. SingularityU leverages exponential technologies to solve humanity’s grand challenges, which is basically to find ways to use those technologies in our favor, to fight challenges such as food, shelter, disasters and even learning.
On July 11, at IDEIAhub – Palácio Sotto Mayor, from 6pm to 8pm, our panel composed of Startup Founders, Policy Makers and Corporate Leaders, will share their experiences with Singularity University as alumni from several different programs and discuss questions such as what is the exponential mindset? Why do we need it? Will the future be exponential? How can Portugal leverage these new technologies in an exponential context? That’s why the theme of this chapter is exactly: “Introducing Portugal to the international mindset”.
The panel is composed of Sofia Couto da Rocha, Founder at SkinSoul; Paulo Pisano, Chief People Officer at Galp Energia; Pedro Corte Garcia, Co-Founder at mov.e and Ricardo Marvão, Co-founder at Beta-i and SingularityU Cascais Lisbon Chapter Ambassador.
For more information on Chapters check the SU Chapter page and get to know some examples of Chapters held last year in the 2017 Year in Review Report. Make sure you register for the Chapter here.
by Carolina Santos | Jun 25, 2018 | Startups
Last week I’ve been on the last day of Protechting’s bootcamp. It’s far from being my first one, but it was the first time I actually stopped to analyze them. Not to judge them, not to evaluate them, but to have their backs even without speaking. A lot of our startups come from abroad so their support system is far away.
I used to have this teacher back in college that said we all should go, at least once, to a club, to be completely sober and just observe, he said it was one of the richest sociological experiences he’d ever had. I never did it. But I’ve decided to observe people during a pitch day of an open innovation program, I pretty much minded their businesses without even knowing them.
For a week the startups share our building (Beta-i) but the whole team doesn’t have a close contact with them – we’re almost 60 people -, so we don’t get to know their dreams, their hopes, their fears. But if we stop for an hour to hear them pitch we can have an easy access to all of that. The beauty of pitching is that is someone on their most vulnerable state, trying to convince people they’re good, that they’re here to make a change and they know that unless they’re willing to put their heart, sweat, tears and nervous system on stage, they don’t stand a chance.
I learned that the more you understand and/or enjoy a certain kind of technology the more focused you are during the pitch and the more the nerves are insignificant to you. I have a soft spot for healthtech so, even though, I know for a fact they were all nervous it isn’t that easy for me to understand it and that made me realize that who’s evaluating can easily ignore the fact that their hearts are on their mouths on that stage.
Dry mouth, racing heart, moving hands frenetically are some of the stage symptoms, but it’s the differences that make them unique. Some decide to face the stage in pairs, others record their partner on stage. I may be extremely unfair here but I’d say portuguese and spanish are the ones who show more nerves on stage – this hot blood of ours doesn’t help our cause. The funny thing is that their posture changes from night to day as soon as their pitches end and the Q&A starts.
What do they all have in common? The relief when leaving the stage. For what they all go through, the pressure they put themselves under, my huge congratulations. All 23 were amazing – they always are.
However, from those 23 there were 12 moving forward, it’s not a matter of being better, it’s a matter of fitting better the needs of the client. And those are: SkinSoul, Criamtech, CopSonic, Humanoo, Wall-i, MedicSen, Gistek, BaylifeTech, TMASS, SpinAnalytics, Cardiomo and Rnters.
We’ll see each other soon.
by Carolina Santos | Jun 19, 2018 | Startups
After 157 applications from 35 different countries that included 15% focused on Insurtech, 28% on Fintech and 31% on Healthtech and after a selection process, Protechting is ready to receive its 25 finalists selected for the bootcamp.
Among the selected 23 there are 5 from Portugal, 5 from Spain, 4 from Germany, 3 from the UK, 2 from the US, 2 from Macau, 1 from Mozambique, 1 from Finland and 1 from France.
Meet them – even though just online – and know what they do:
- Medicsen (Spain) – Non-invasive artificial pancreas for diabetes: Predictive AI + smartpatch. It improves quality of life in the diabetic patients providing them with a personalized, automatic and non-invasive treatment, decreasing associated complications like blindness or amputations.
- HUMANOO (Germany) – Empowers people to achieve their personal health goals. How? With the help of e-therapists. They count with the support of 40 people from 10 different countries from creative minds, fitness freaks, physiotherapists, yoga gurus to food bloggers.
- SkinSoul (Portugal) – a technology that allows Medical Doctors (MD) from all specialties to screen for skin cancer their patients, with immediate feedback given by a tested AI system. Then the MD can immediately create a referral to the dermatologist. All in less than 2 minutes.
- Criamtech (Portugal) – CRIAM stands for Chemical Reaction Image Analysis for Mobility, a portable medical device that identifies the human ABO and Rh blood type and subtype within 3 minutes, and detects diseases. CRIAM represents a new methodology for blood phenotyping based on a cartridge (with the specific reagents for the test) and on image processing techniques to determine the occurrence of agglutination – between blood sample and reagent.
- Cardiomo (United States of America) – the mobile app serves as a display for vitals and metrics as well as a medication schedule reminder. It is also a communication center for user and designated observers — doctors, family, friends. When vitals go beyond normal range or the AI spots abnormalities in the EKG, there is a push notification to the user and/or observers stating the nature of the issue. This remote monitoring feature provides more precious time for rescuers in case of an emergency. The AI adjusts itself to each user thus providing more accurate diagnostics.
- Supaspot (United States of America) – Captures lifestyle data from GenZ using the SUPA App at sports and music events (brand partnerships) from IoT devices (wearables, mobile phone apps). GenZ continues using the SUPA App and captures data.
- Rnters (Portugal) – a peer-to-peer rental marketplace where users can rent or safely monetize any item. scene, there was no simple or safe alternative to purchasing a new board, which didn’t make sense for a casual traveller.
- Gistek (Spain) – Develops advanced and independent solutions in the insurance sector that improve their value chain through automation, standardization, interconnection, communication and confidentiality, always promoting simplicity of management, cloud computing, mobility, e-commerce, e-invoice, groupware, document management, systems interconnection and Business Intelligence.
- CopSonic (France) – A new, patented, universal contactless communication protocol enabling digital security, smart detection and IoT connectivity between electronic devices in either attended or unattended or automated mode. Not limited to smartphones, computers, connected devices and peripherals, other machines. Distributed through an SDK and white labelled applications, the solution can be integrated by B2B partners within their vertical activities and existing environments (applications, web sites, servers…) as a complement or alternative to state-of-the-art technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth or QR Codes which are currently suffering from the compatibility rate issues and poor UX on the end user side.
- Working Minds (Spain) – It delivers affordable, remote treatment and develops AI-based diagnostic tools for mental disorders.
- Senseitrade (Spain) – Their mobile-first investment platform seeks to democratize investing and targets demographics that have been priced out of investing on the stock exchange notably due to costly broker fees. It offers a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to search for companies that are trading on an exchange. The platform has no restriction around portfolio sizes and operates on a low-commission model so low value traders are not excluded. It offers smart alerts when relevant information is published on the internet or social media. So investors can make decisions in stock markets more informed.
- BillFront (Germany) – They make it easy for young and growing digital media companies to access funding by connecting to their accounting and invoicing systems and getting their receivables as security.
- CoinAnalyst (Germany) – It’s a software system that enables any trader in the crypto asset sector and other industries to access a dashboard which monitors and analyses real-time data from the crypto and ICO market. CoinAnalyst is based on the patented Cogia technology which uses semantic indexing and structuring of online data using pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Additionally, the system provides news, price quotes and messaging. Similar to the information provider Bloomberg in the traditional financial market, they want to become the equivalent information provider in the crypto market – not exclusive like Bloomberg, but open for the mass market.
- Wall-i (Portugal) – Wall-I.TV is the most advanced cloud-based Digital Signage OS, able to provide segmented content for the audience consuming the information and versatile enough to be adaptable to the presentation of contents within different context requirements, taking advantage of the IoT’s opportunities for the widely spread of the technology within the context of Smart Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising, Smart Cities and Industry 4.0. It provides immediate deployment and setup within different media display contexts, audience metrics, insights and interaction, ambience monitoring, APIs for integration, and both big and small business reach.
- Spin Analytics (United Kingdom) – Brings digital transformation in Credit Risk Management by leveraging predictive analytics, AI and ML techniques on Big Data. It is a software framework that also implements and fully automates many modern sophisticated methodologies and algorithms used by the world leaders in the industries of Banking and Credit Modeling for effective Risk Management purposes and regulatory purposes.
- Reputation Transfer (United Kingdom) – Makes tools that pull the user’s data from sharing economy platforms upon request, having verified that the data is sourced from the correct accounts. The verification process doesn’t require either the user’s credentials or the exporting platform’s consent.
- Sharemy (United Kingdom) – The platform is based on a Shared Ledger framework which is underpinned by a machine learning & block chain model. Our focus is help enabled the users in the peer to peer market place to use our service to give them a on demand insurance service for peer peer transactions. Our mobile & desktop application is targeted at current and new peer to peer services where the renter/seller of that service need an on-demand insurance support/cover. Our second channel of focus is to offer the service to brands or retailers looking to enter the peer to peer marketplace, for examples tool manufacturers looking to rents tools versus buy them.
- LitigationCoin (Germany) – Provides legal tech solutions for litigation financiers on different occasions.
- B2Quant (Portugal) – It aims to explore the potential of automated quantification tools in the analysis of medical images. The starting point is QuantEmTool (QET), a quantification method developed within the context of a MSc thesis in Biomedical engineering. QET allows automatic segmentation of global brain volumes and FLAIR magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequence hyperintensities, and following calculation of brain atrophy and lesion load, particularly relevant indicators to multiple sclerosis follow-up. QET can also be of value in the follow-up of other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson and Alzheimer.
- Fjuul (Finland) – Provides a digital platform that enables insurers to offer digital smart insurance using real-time data to increase customer engagement and trigger preventive care rather than providing just pure risk coverage.
- Tech (Mozambique) – It’s a company launched completely for Mozambican people, where its own main goal is to generate applicable and innovative solutions to Mozambican needs. These solutions answer to needs in different sectors of society, based on Communication and information technology.
- TMASS (Macau) – It aims to provide revolutionary solutions for quantitative and qualitative analyses of protein molecules, which covers various aspects of human healthcare including “precision medicine”, “therapeutic protein drugs” and “medical cosmetology”. It strives to solve the issues of high cost, long development time, long turnaround time, low accuracy and poor quality control.
- Baylife Tech (Macau) – They’ve developed a groundbreaking technology that enables the storage of stem cells under room-temperature and oxygen-free conditions for more than 10 days with ensured cell viability and functions, thus saving costly cryopreservation equipment and the corresponding process.
The Bootcamp will run until June 22. Know more about the program here.
