The University of Helsinki's Innovation & Entrepreneurship Services Team has finished reviewing the applications for its first pre-incubator under the Helsinki Incubator Programme umbrella and is now proud to announce the teams selected for Compass, the Kumpula-based Deep Tech, AI, and Sustainability Pre-Incubator.
"The team was ecstatic to receive 23 amazing applications from innovators in a number of fields hoping to join our programme and get the necessary support to properly start their entrepreneurial journey. After an intense interview and review process, we've had to make some very tough decisions and have now selected what we feel are the 15 teams we can best assist," explains Project Manager and Kumpula Incubator Lead Andrés Peña Archila.
"We remain eternally grateful to all the applicants, and wish to re-emphasise how competitive this first batch was and how difficult the selection process ultimately was. There were no easy decisions!"
"Frankly, the standard of applications far surpassed our expectations, and we hope to see a similar level of enthusiasm and high-standard of applications for all of our future programmes," says Helsinki Incubator Programmes partner Helsinki Think Company's CEO and selection jury-member Rosa Salmivuori.
The teams will now begin their journey in the pre-incubator on May 6th and will be presenting their ideas to the world at the programme finale on June 15th at the Kumpula campus' Exactum building.
Interested in finding out more about the selected teams? Find out more about them below!
Aarre App
Aarre seeks to make travel more interesting and sustainable by providing people with easier ways of connecting with unforgettable experiences located a stone's throw away from them. The app offers service providers and communities in less traditional Finnish destinations the opportunity to present their hidden-gems to a broader audience, and encourages users to think more about travelling local, not global.
AdaPrice
AdaPrice sees the very old problem of food waste in the retail sector, and seeks to solve this by applying new digital solutions to solve it. By introducing dynamic pricing solutions utilising cloud computing and big data to the retail sector, and by leveraging new technologies such as digital price tags and next generation barcodes that are currently being rolled out, the team hopes to reduce food waste linked to spoilage.
AgriBot
AgriBot is born from the realisation that current agricultural practices are unsustainable due to the manpower required to farm commercially, and it meaning that farming is done at field-scale. By introducing AI powered robotics, AgriBot hopes to bring farming down to the plant-level, with drones treating each plant as an individual. With the possibility for more individualised attention, farmers can save money and the environment by reducing their pesticide and fertiliser usage through more restrained yet focused applications, as well as increase biodiversity in the field by allowing for both plant cohabitation and the planting of larger, more nutritious varieties traditionally avoided by the prevailing monoculture ethos.
Alpha Energy/Madiba
Alpha Energy sees the unreliable centralised power grids and underdeveloped renewable energy markets of Sub-Saharan Africa as an opportunity to bring increased standards of living to nearly a continent's worth of people in an environmentally friendly manner. With its Madiba platform, Alpha Energy seeks to bring African consumers closer to renewable energy production & storage solution producers and microfinance service providers, enabling continued yet sustainable electrification in these growing markets.
Binki
Farming is becoming more challenging by the year with increasing regulation, a growing number of beneficial and mandatory certifications, and looming climate-related challenges. Having heard the concerns of overwhelmed farmers, Binki wants to help by providing a way to receive no-stress compliance assistance, easily understandable environmental impact tracking, vital information on climate matters, and more.
Blink
Entering student life often brings many challenges to young people, with being thrown into the deep end of financial independence being one of the most common ones. Working with AI-powered personalised advice based on users' fiscal data, Blink seeks to provide an engaging gamified service to students tailor-made for them to obtain financial peace of mind. With individualised spending limits, reward systems, e-banking services and plans for much more, Blink promises students the ability to stay on top of their budget and new ways of guaranteeing significant extra savings when they graduate.
Jobble
We all wish we'd had more career advice when we were younger, or that the information we'd gotten had been more relevant and accessible to us. Jobble aims to solve this problem by building a great online educational platform featuring inspiring, easily digestible information for career building that is up to date and pertinent to its student audiences' goals and interests.
Enreport
The energy sector remains stodgy and inefficient, and Enreport wants to change that by building AI-powered algorithmic energy management systems useful to all of the industry's stakeholder groups. By providing data-driven recommendation systems, price & usage predictions, energy trading systems, and more to producers, retailers, consumers, and analysts the team hopes to make the world of energy more agile and save its users money.
iLuEarth
Carbon footprint management is an important part of the global green transition, and iLuEarth is working to make it easier to do so effectively. By providing automated carbon accounting, effective climate action insights, and satellite based offset project monitoring, iLuEarth wants their platform to be a premiere choice for businesses to measure, reduce, and offset their carbon footprint.
Optim
International expansion is a key driver for growth for any business, yet market entry can be hard to plan and harder still to execute. Optim seeks to facilitate this by providing businesses with a platform where they can find valuable information on which markets to select and new partners in the ones they choose to expand to.
OrientLock
OrientLock is a University of Helsinki research-based start-up working on innovative biotech solutions.
Quanticum Digital
Creating online learning experiences can be a cumbersome and challenging process with multiple elements having to be considered and handled simultaneously, and institutions having to invest and integrate a variety of tools and platforms to create the optimal educational product. Quanticum Digital seeks to simplify this process by providing a central partner that handles the technology, support, and development of online learning experiences utilising the latest in technology and methods.
Sci2sci Publishing
Research publishing and experiment data sharing is, in its present form, cumbersome. Data, once published lacks accessibility for both people and AI, and the threshold for publication is high, limiting the collaborative potential of science. Sci2Sci Publishing is creating a new kind of publishing platform allowing for research data to be analysed and re-analysed by other researchers to reproduce experiments and build on published findings, while also encouraging more small-scale publishing and greater scale collaboration through the publication and citing of individual experiments and more responsive and customisable viewing tools.
SilvaTrace & Aari Lab
Being able to trace the provenance of raw ingredients is becoming more prevalent in many industries, including fashion. SilvaTrace is working to build similar levels of transparency and traceability to lumber production to track the wood used in products at every step of its journey with the use of blockchain technology, helping consumers easily choose ethically certified and produced wood products and giving forest owners more ways of getting their responsible forest management recognised.
Switchooo
Consumer electronics are an essential part of modern life, but investing in a new device can be daunting due to not being able to test it in real world conditions and the overall costs being high. Switchooo aims to solve this issue by letting consumers use the latest technology with a subscription-based model, letting people try devices for a set duration and then decide if they want to keep using the device, buy it, or switch to a new one. No more buyers remorse, no more old devices lying at the bottom of a drawer!